


Time, Like Grains Of Sand

by Wikiaddicted723



Series: Time, Like Grains Of Sand [2]
Category: Fringe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-30
Updated: 2012-01-29
Packaged: 2017-10-30 08:10:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/329647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wikiaddicted723/pseuds/Wikiaddicted723
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to "Father Time's Mistakes". Season 4 AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. An Hourglass, Broken

Peter knew this would happen.

 

He stands behind the door, his head hanging between hunched shoulders, his hands splayed wide against the wall, droplets of water – gone - cold dripping from his still-wet hair into the dark walnut of his floor, splashing imperceptibly against the cold skin of his feet, making fragmented patterns that he doesn’t bother to try and decipher. Codes and conspiracies, conjectures and theories, they hold no interest for him anymore outside of work and necessity, and the small smile his skepticism might steal from her mouth.

 

He feels disjointed, left behind, a discordant note in an otherwise perfectly composed symphony. He’d pushed the world forward with his last herculean breath, once, but the world it seems, had forgotten to bring him along. Nothing makes sense anymore, in this prison he’s made for himself, the muscle he calls heart encased in iron bars deep inside his chest, it’s beating soundless though it roars in his ears. He feels it, its thumping firm, relentless, his blood running white – hot in his veins, and yet he wonders. He wonders because the world is still there, both of them, their colors and textures intact. He wonders why he feels like he dies. Only a little, only sometimes, but he dies.

 

Nothing makes sense, except the one person breathing on the other side of the threshold. But he can’t let her pass, not now. Not like this.

 

He’s not stupid, though fact and repetition might indicate otherwise. He knows why she’s here, using up hours of her day off that she should be spending on sleeping before the universes threaten to fall apart (yet again) by standing outside his tiny studio apartment. She’s been looking for him, chasing him with words that her mouth refuses to say, clear as day on her face, throwing searching glances in his direction that he forbids himself from returning, the pain and regret in the bottomless depths of her gaze reminding him of the weight of his mistakes, each a link that holds him down and binds him at her feet with unbreakable chains.

 

He is reminded of Prometheus, and Loki, and Maui inside the whale, their punishments cruel, inhumane even to gods that where anything but, Hell too peaceful a place for their sins. He looks back at them and applauds, congratulates.

 

He envies them.

 

They know nothing of the ache of seeing her every day, of being so close he can breathe the air from her lungs, retrace her steps with his own, smell everything that makes her scent from the hollow of her throat, remember the smoothness of her skin under his fingertips, yet be forced to step back and watch from a distance, an unwitting prisoner of his own devising.

 

But she’s nothing if not stubborn, perhaps even more so than him, and she won’t relent until she has the answers she needs. So Peter knew this would happen. Eventually.

 

His only hope was that he’d have enough time to prepare himself, to straighten the chaos in his mind so that actual words might come out of his mouth once she asks the inevitable. But he’s deluding himself.

 

Time, though malleable under his hands, mercurial under his will, has a knack for coming back to bite him in the ass.

 

“Peter,” she says, her voice annoyed yet somehow pleading, and he can picture her perfectly in his mind, her posture expectant as she waits for him to let her through, the hand she knocked with still pressed against the door, her form attentive, listening, “I know you’re there, just…open the door”

 

The soft tone of her voice makes him raise his head, look through the peephole. She’s there sure enough, her hair down, messier than usual, the ever present suit nowhere to be found, replaced instead by slightly frayed jeans and a dark hoodie he doesn’t remember her wearing before. She looks like she dragged herself out of bed. Knowing her, that’s exactly what she’d done.

 

“What’s in it for me?” he asks, risks, hiding behind the well worn mask of sarcasm and cynicism though he knows she can see right through it, right through him. She always has, and this time’s no different. He knows he’s fighting a lost battle, knew it the moment he heard her knock on the door, saw her wide green stare outside his door; it’s only a matter of time before he caves, he’s aware of that, but the ticking has not yet come to a stop.

 

“Well, you get the pleasure of my company for one,” she says, her voice nonchalant though her soft, puzzled expression and curious gaze, head slightly tilted to the side, says she’s anything but. He pities the pocket in her jeans, knowing she’s got the hand not on his door shoved as deep as humanely possible inside it, threatening to rip the seams apart with the tension in her hand, unnoticed to the untrained eye.

 

If only pleasure were all he wants, he thinks, sighing, whishing her statement didn’t sound so _wrong_ considering their current predicament, knowing she only meant it to be teasing, probably believing that seeing her is the last he wants. If only she knew. He wants so much more, so much more than she can imagine…but he has no right to ask, no right to her. He’s never had it, divergent timelines or not. (He had just been lucky to be on the receiving end of her smoldering sun, once.)

 

“Peter,” she repeats, and he loves the way her lips move as they form the syllables of his name. He hears her sigh behind the door, the sound muffled, sees her close her eyes, take a breath, “Peter…please” she whispers, as if talking to herself, somehow wishing him into action with the soft velvet of her voice.

 

Peter shivers, half-remembered conversations in the moonlight running through his mind, words whispered in the quiet of the night while cuddling on the couch, some bad sci-fi movie playing in the background, coming forward from the pit of memory, latching themselves onto his conscious mind. Conversations that never were, conversations that might be. He clings to the ‘might’ in his wording, hopes.

 

With that thought and her smile (always her smile) he gives in, surrenders, cracks the door open just enough to lean against it, his cheek barely rubbing the smooth wooden planes, the contact light.

 

“See,” he says, his voice quiet, serious and yet anything but cold. If anything, she feels as if the very breath he exhales scorches her skin, and all she can think of is that she wants more of his warmth, more of him, “You just needed to ask me nicely.”

 

She snorts, a smirk on her face as she shakes her head minutely, the movement short, precise, “May I _please_ come in, or would you rather stand here the rest of the night, good sir?”

 

He smiles, the grin lighting up his face, the crows feet on the corner of his eyes standing out with the different stretch on his facial muscles. The action looks natural on him, like he does it often, the gesture looking at home on his lips. It suits him, she thinks. She wishes he’d do it more often, like this, his smile open, unreserved, true.

 

“I knew you were a fast learner.” He opens the door wide, steps aside, helpless.

 

He lets her in because he misses her smile, misses the way her nose scrunches up, her eyes squinting adorably when he makes her laugh at a particularly witty joke, misses the way her freckles give substance to her skin, misses her mind, the way she thinks, analyzes, misses the intensity with which she lives, feels, misses the way she looks at him in the night, when she thinks he sleeps, her always-cold digits tracing his face, the shell of his ear, before swimming in his hair in a caress that serves to reassure her. Most of all, he misses her.

 

She walks past him, swallowing reflexively as tension gradually leaves her body, hands in pockets as she takes a proper look at his modest living arrangements (she hopes he can’t feel the waves of relief that must surely be oozing from her, she wasn’t sure he’d let her in). It’s the first time she’s been inside, the second…no, third time she’s ever stood outside his door. The first time she does so with out it being case related.

 

The small loft is neat, clean, its spaces perfectly distributed to achieve maximum efficiency in so little space: a well worn yet comfortable looking couch in front of a decently sized television, a clean yet definitely used kitchenette, the full – to – bursting book case set against one wall beside the window, opposite the bed and the little space that passes for his closet, the small drawing table sitting inert beside the book case, the lamp above it shinning down on a clutter of files and papers and blueprints that conform the only chaos in this calm. It says a lot about him, the way he thinks, the way he lives.

 

She’s a little surprised that he’s managed to settle in so well in such a short span (She’s lived in her apartment for years now, and she’s sure she still hasn’t unpacked all the boxes), he’s only had the apartment in lease from the FBI for a couple of weeks, a month at most, after they’d found him a place more suitable than his deserted hotel room and yet it seems like he’s been here all his life. He’s very good at it, she thinks, like he’s used to move from place to place all the time, almost nomadic.

 

The thought rings a bell softly in the back of her mind, the concept somehow familiar in association with this man, yet nothing concrete manages to come forth in her usually flawless memory, and so she pays it no mind.

 

“Have you eaten?” he asks, interrupting her introspection, moving to the sink to finish rinsing some glasses and a plate, apparently what he’d been doing before she knocked.

 

“Sure.” She answers noncommittally, distracted.

 

“Right,” he says, turning towards her fully, his bodyweight resting on his hands, palms flat against the chilled metal of the countertop. “And that, in Olivia Dunham lexicon, means you haven’t had a bite ever since that half-munched cucumber sandwich Walter shoved your way this afternoon while you poured over case files.”

 

Olivia startles a bit, looking back at him with half – veiled weariness at his apparent knowledge of her eating habits (or lack thereof in this particular case), more than a little uncomfortable with the fact that he seems to read her like an open book, know her like the palm of his hand while she’s left grasping at straws on anything that regards him.

 

She shrugs, conceding the point. She’s hungry anyway.

 

She trusts him, perhaps against her better judgment. She knows it’s irrational having in mind that her knowledge of him accounts to little else besides his name and whatever he’s let slip about his life before she met him in this timeline, what knowledge she’s gained of him amid the sheets, their bodies tangled in rocking motion, inconsequential under the shroud of mystery that surrounds him. But her gut tells her he’s reliable, steadfast, and he hasn’t shown signs that might deny that. She’s always trusted her gut; it’s never failed her. She hopes that doesn’t change.

 

And it’s not that he denies her answers, she reasons, it’s that she’s never known what the right questions are, and that baffles her.

 

“Why does that not surprise me?” he mutters to himself, shaking his head, “how do pizza left overs sound to you? I’m afraid I don’t really keep a guest menu around.”

 

“Pizza it is then,” she says, trying to keep her voice neutral, musing on the fact that he can put her at ease with seemingly no effort on his part.  She should be annoyed, if not a little scared, she’s curious instead.

 

It doesn’t really surprise her; her survival instinct has always been a little deficient like that. She has no fear for herself, and that’s a scientifically proven fact.

 

She looks back at him, following his rustling in what passes for a kitchen as he brings out the cardboard box with half a pizza still inside, sticking two pieces in the oven, heating them up. Olivia likes this side of him, relishes in the spark of mischief that has made a home beneath the swirling blue of his irises, though she’d never tell him so, its sightings rare yet somehow ever present in the way he treats her. She likes the glimpses at the true humor behind his biting remarks, his cynic meditations on the nature of their work, likes that he’s layered, the surface barely scratching at the what ifs and could bes of what lies beneath the thick shell of his skin. She guesses she just likes _him_.

 

“Is wine alright or are you feeling the need for something stronger?” he asks, not bothering to turn around to look at her as he opens and closes cabinets, the fridge, moving around with a certainty and grace that speaks to her of someone used to being watched. She’s sure he knows she hasn’t stopped staring at him since she came in. If he’s uncomfortable at all then he must have an iron control, perhaps the perfect poker face, because she has seen no indication of it.

 

“Wine’s fine, thanks.” Anything stronger has always led to one inevitable conclusion on the few nights they have kept each other company, and that is not what she came for tonight.

 

Peter nods, his shoulders loosening minutely, relaxing, and she wonders if he’d been thinking the same. Which would in turn mean, judging by the action she catalogues as stemming from relief, that he disliked the idea in the first place. She doesn’t know if she should feel hurt about it or elated that he wants her company for more than sex (if he wants her company at all. She hadn’t given him much choice by showing up), but considering recent revelations she wouldn’t judge him if he was disgusted with the way she’s treated him the past 3 months. She certainly is.

 

The thought makes her heart pound faster in anxiety as she’s forced to remember why exactly she’d made herself come here, to seek him out and corner him in a way that would leave him no choice but to answer her questions. Any other time, any other place and she’s sure he would’ve just continued to avoid her. But she’s here, and he’s here and there is no going anywhere; not until she gets the answers she so desperately needs. Not until she has the chance to apologize.

 

Making the words pass through the tennis ball lodged in her throat is going to be another mater altogether.

 

***

 

Olivia is used to many things in life.  

 

She’s used to loneliness, it is a companion that creeps under her sheets at night, spoons behind her in a cold embrace, follows her steps everywhere she walks. She’s used to anger, knows how to use it, is comfortable with the way it makes everything crystal clear in her mind’s eye, the world in perfect definition as it unravels. She’s used to pain. It has never failed to make its presence known, physically or otherwise.

 

These define the cycle of her life, the vicious spiraling fall that comprises her existence, and she can’t help but wonder what she’d done and when, to make the world hate her so. She must deserve it, if she is to believe that any form of justice is possible, true.

 

But fear has never had a part in it.

 

Still, sitting on the floor of his living room, her head thrown back against the worn leather of the couch, the remains of half a pizza lying on the table between them as he rambles on about some experiment of Walter’s, she can’t help but feel her throat close up slightly, and her hands, always moderately colder to the touch, grow clammy with something as akin to anxiety as she has ever felt, perhaps apprehension in its mildest way. She knows she needs to do this, and she knows she needs to do it now.

 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she interrupts, non sequitur, her eyes half lidded yet not at all less intense. If anything, he thinks, the shadows help give her her the air of a tiger ready to pounce, her limbs graceful at rest, her pray in sight.

“I’m sorry, what?” he says, stops in his tracks, the moment he’s been dreading the most since she walked through the door like a kick in the gut in it’s suddenness. He’d somehow fooled himself (yet again) into the belief that escaping that particular conversation was a possibility for tonight; had let her lure him into a sense of comfort and security before springing the question on him. He’s never liked surprises much, it’s no wonder he never liked jack – in – the – boxes. He likes interrogations even less, when he’s on the wrong side of the table.

 

“Why didn’t you tell me we were married, before?” she repeats, her voice quiet but clear as she enunciates every syllable with perfect precision.

 

He sighs, brushes his face with his hand, drains the wine glass in a gulp. He closes the cardboard box on the table, picks the plates up and carries them to the kitchen, all the while aware of her stare piercing his back.

 

“We weren’t,” he says, standing once more beside her, shooing her to the side slightly so he can sit adjacent to her, mimicking her position, his head thrown back against the couch, his hands palms up on the ground, “not this version of us anyway.”

 

She looks at him funny, not understanding. He’s quick to explain.

 

“The previous timeline, the one I’m from,” he looks towards her to make sure she follows, “it was trapped in a loop, like a closed circuit where everything happened the same way every time it was completed. We _have_ been married at least four times I think, but this last iteration, this last loop, was broken before we got to that point. I never existed in this timeline before you found me, so you didn’t know me, but it had only been a couple of days since I’d last seen you.”

 

She nods in understanding, though she can feel a headache coming on. She can see the truth behind his words; can understand why she would come to love him, even though she can’t say she feels the same. There’s goodness in him, righteousness, and an unhealthy devotion that intimidates her every time she catches a glimpse of it behind his eyes.

 

“Besides,” he adds, once he’s sure she’s understood him, “what was I supposed to say? Hello, I’m Peter Bishop and I’m your husband from another timeline?” he snorts, “I didn’t tell you because you wouldn’t have believed me. You still have no reason to.”

 

“Bishop.” She states more than asks, her tone low, dangerous. It helps that he can’t see the way she looks at him from his position; he doesn’t think he’d be able to hold her stare for long. He figures if he’s going to come clean, his actual name might be a good place to start.

 

 “Yeah…” he says, “it’s kind of a long story.”

 

“I’ve got time” she replies, turning her head towards him, fixing her eyes on him, evaluating, “Do you have anywhere else you need to be?” he turns to look at her then.

 

“I’m not sure you want to hear it.”

 

“Try me.”

 

He tells her, of course. He tells her everything.

 

***

 

Olivia listens intently throughout his tale, only interrupting a couple of times to ask for elaboration on things that catch her interest. She asks a lot about Ella for instance, and he’s rewarded with the teary, heartbroken smile that graces her face when he tells her how beautifully she’d grown up. She doesn’t ask a lot about the switch, noticing how uncomfortable it makes him, but he can feel her stiffen momentarily at his admissions.

 

She also asks a lot about their marriage, and how he knows of it he didn’t live it, is rendered into silence when he explains, tells her he’d been the one to break the cycle, bring about the timeline she lives in at the cost of his existence in the lives of the people he’d given everything for.

 

“Do you ever think about going back?” she asks when he’s done, her voice small in the gray light of early morning before dawn as it slips in through the window, her heart clenching against her will at the very real possibility that he’d rather be in a world where she’s dead than have her not remember him, not love him.

 

“No,” he answers, looking straight ahead, “ there was nothing for me there anymore.”

 

“You had your life.” She whispers.

 

He shakes his head, a small sad smile on his face, “no,” he says, “you’re _here_.”

 

She has nothing to say to that, her eyes closing of their own accord as she presses a hand against her mouth. She feels his pain, somewhere in the cavity of her chest, intense enough to be her own.

 

“Peter,” she murmurs after a while, when the silence in the room has impregnated every surface, “I’m sorry. For everything.” She says simply, sincerity dripping from her voice, she doesn’t elaborate, doesn’t need to. He knows everything the words carry, everything they hide behind them.

 

He feels her smaller hand fit itself into his open one between them, her fingers moving to weave themselves with his, her motions tentative, slow, unsure. He lets the sensation of the simple touch invade him; fill him to the brim as it spreads through crevices dark and forgotten in his chest.

 

“I know” he says, brings her hand up with his to press a kiss on its back, a simple brush of lips, a caress. A promise. They’ll be okay; someday they’ll be okay.

 

Having her here is painful and bittersweet, but it makes the darkness of his world recede, makes him remember the many reasons he loves her, the many reasons he has to remain, to wait, and to him, that is enough. He was never one for sugarcoated tales anyway. Lucky him.

 

She’s still here, and hope is a certainty she carries with her.

 

It is enough.


	2. Baseline Fractures

His body is humming.

 

Peter has not even gone through the door (the tank proof, energy – dispersing – alloy – made door thicker than he is) and his body is crackling with electricity, the hair on his arms and neck standing at attention in the fashion of elite trained soldiers. He can hear an almost imperceptible though distinct buzzing in his ears, and knows a headache is probably on its way.

 

Coming here has ‘ _Bad Idea_ ’ written all over it in big, bold lettering, but he needs to do this. He’s never left any job unfinished within the Fringe Division, and he’s not about to start when said job is overseeing the cooperation of two universes. Cooperation he’d made possible by overwriting his timeline, therefore momentarily and unwittingly blinking out of existence.

 

He figures he’s the architect; he might as well take responsibility for whatever it is he’s built.

 

Old Peter (friendless, loveless, lying Peter) would have just hightailed it he knows, his legs not carrying him out of there fast enough. But he’d stopped being Old Peter ever since he’d gotten a taste at the life Olivia Dunham had offered him, perhaps ever since she’d lain her wide green eyes on him and dared him to _be better_ with a stubborn tilt of her chin in his direction, an arched eyebrow the blood seal of his covenant. He has a purpose now, and he’s not about to turn away from it.

 

It’s a lesson she taught him well.

 

It can’t be discounted that he’s also not very comfortable with having his _father_ and Olivia in the same room at the same time. He knows it’s biased, but it feels too much like dangling a peace of raw meat in front of a hungry lion, and he’s learned not to tempt fate. That goes without explanation.

 

He peels the outer layers of clothing from his body with deliberate slowness, trying not to elicit any sudden movement in his head that might accelerate what has the potential of becoming a blinding migraine, depositing his jacket, sweater and scarf on a plastic bin that might have been gray. There’s no way to tell under the intense red lighting of the narrow, high ceilinged hall designated for security control. 

 

He removes his wallet, cellphone, and keys, passing through the metal detector at a nod from the Massive Dynamic scientist behind the Plexiglas screen on his right, turning to look at a disrobing Olivia and Walter, who follow his example promptly, five months of doing this giving their movements the familiarity of a well rehearsed choreography. A familiarity he does not yet posses.

 

It’s the very first time since he was allowed back into the fold of the Fringe Division that he’s coming to the bridge with the rest of the team. He’d been on probation, the veracity of his fucked-up tale under close scrutiny (and with good reason, he’s forced to recognize), though he had requested clearance to be here since he started working with Walter at the lab. A clearance he had been strictly denied “until further notice.” Until now.

 

Peter is not stupid, he knows Olivia had something to do with it. The woman has more leverage with her higher ups than she realizes most of the time, but no one can deny that she knows how to use it. Pulling strings is much more than just an innate ability of hers. He’s also sure that her decision to fight for his inclusion in the fortnightly control reunions had nothing to do with their personal business. He’d be inclined to say she only wants him there because she now knows that he’s the machine’s pair, its only biological interface.  

 

For the first time since he came back he’s valuable in a way that cannot be replaced, and she’s not about to throw that overboard. She cannot allow herself to squander what little resources she has. He’s not complaining.

 

He stands ahead of them, waiting as Olivia helps Walter with his favorite coat the way he himself might have done so once. It hurts, being so close and yet so far away from the man who, for all intents and purposes, had done nothing but love him. That love had cost them two universes and a timeline rewrite, so perhaps it was better this way.

 

Walter has his moments, small interludes of time in which he acts as if nothing had ever changed, patting his back, and looking at him as if he’d found whatever it was that he’d been missing. The moments are short and far between, but they are there and they give him hope that perhaps some day he might get both of them back.

 

Because if Walter can remember, he thinks, with his fragmented memories, his damaged yet brilliant mind, why not Olivia who has never known limitations outside of those she’s subconsciously imposed on herself?

 

It’s meager, he knows, but it is all he can hold onto. Hold on to them; hold on to her, on to what they once were. On to what he hopes they could be again. The potential is there, blatant and undisturbed beneath the surface, his actions causing ripples in the darkest corners of the abyss between them, the space he had once filled.

 

“You ready?” Astrid asks ahead of him, standing by the door, waiting. He still finds it weird to have to meet Astrid again. Of them all, he thinks, she’s the one who has changed the most and yet, in true paradoxical fashion, she hasn’t. She’s the same, sweet and caring and every bit as selfless as he remembers and yet there’s this air of command about her, an authoritative manner to the way she carries herself. It reminds him vaguely of Olivia and it makes him smile.

 

They’re all but ripples in a pond and she the stone thrown in, unaware of the _“then”_ after her _“if”_ in the equation of their lives.

 

“Me?” he jokes, rueful smile upon his face as he remembers an echo of that same question, uttered by another in similar fashion at the start of it all. Or had it been the end? He can’t seem to come to terms with it, make heads or tails of his tarnished string in the tapestry of their lives, “I was born ready.” Astrid chuckles, rolls her eyes.

 

 _‘No_ ,’ is what he means, what he doesn’t say, ‘ _I don’t think I’ll ever be_.’ But no one needs to know that.

 

Broyles, standing ahead of the group, makes a signal to the Massive Dynamic operators behind the wall, the door opening slowly soon after, fluorescent light invading the space in the hallway and clashing with the red filter in which the room is immersed. He can feel her eyes on him, imagines her looking at him out of the corner of her eye as she stands beside Lincoln. Her partner. Shiny and new and every bit FBI issued.

 

Peter likes the man. He’s smart, friendly, sure footed if a little resistant to open his mind into Walter’s wonderland. Peter doesn’t blame him; he’d been there himself, not so long ago. Crazy is just a matter of time in their particular line of work; he figures the agent will find himself there soon enough. There has never been bad blood between them, and he hopes there will never be, but he can’t help but feel envious of the position that he has by Olivia’s side, a position that had once been his. To safeguard her, to be her accomplice, her back up, her partner.

 

“Are you planning on standing there all day?” Olivia asks, looking back at him curiously, a hint of annoyance in her tone. He realizes just then that he’s still standing at the door, cold sweat running down his back, making his undershirt stick uncomfortably to his skin.

 

He looks down at her, blinks, shakes his head as he steps forward, his eyes glued to the metallic device standing in the background, the symbol of everything he’s done. The representation of his being, of his purpose. It’s an eerie reminder that he’s nothing but a tool in the end. That they all are.  He can’t help the shiver that runs through his spine, like winter itself breathing down upon his bones.

 

“So…who’s the newbie?” he hears to the side, the husky voice so familiar and yet the haughty lilt so incongruous that he has no need to turn around to know who’s asked the question. It’s as if a switch had been thrown inside him, his insides cold, his shoulders tense enough to make tendon snap as he straightens to his full height, feeling a storm of emotion brewing inside, betrayal at the center of his personal hurricane. He turns.

 

Red headed Olivia Dunham flinches. It’s minute, almost insignificantly there before she covers it with her wide, dangerous smirk, her lips lush, and her eyes wildfire, but there’s a particular rigidity to the way she holds herself that’s new, and to him it is enough. He gives her a condescending grin of his own, his eyes vitreous globes of fragmented darkness, disdain plain in their depths. He’s going to enjoy wiping that smirk off her face day by day, if only by not giving her the time of day. It might be petty of him, due to their current circumstances, but he never said he was perfect. Far from it, in fact.

 

“Gentlemen,” Broyles starts, distracting him from his current sure – to – be – a – wreck – train of thought, the inherent authority in the bass of his voice calling everyone to attention as he hands a file to Lincoln’s alternate version. He’d been the one to take over, apparently, after the whole fiasco that resulted in Olivia’s return home, a badly chopped piece of their Broyles an unintentional hitchhiker on her interdimensional ride. And his _father_ , it seems, had felt too superior to grace them with his presence. Peter can’t deny that part of him is relieved, “This is Peter Rook. He has joined the team as a DHS consultant and will be assisting Dr. Bishop in his work.”

 

The tall Agent, his commander for all he’s worth, nods towards him and Peter swiftly moves in, acts the obedient lackey to his lord as he shakes Other – Lincoln’s hand, and Charlie – with – the – scar’s after it, praying for self control to not crush the red haired woman’s smaller hand as it fits into his own. He’s never hurt a woman before, and Peter is determined never to do so, no matter the circumstances. He promised to someone, perhaps himself, to remain as civil as he can, sarcastic jackassery non – inclusive.

 

He even manages what must resemble a non- threatening expression when he looks back at her, seeing as her expression remains carefully neutral. He should be proud.

 

(And if _Olivia,_ for all intents and purposes the most damaged party in this particular wrinkle of their lives, can manage some semblance of civility, then he has no business doing otherwise. She’s a better person than him though, always has been and always will be. He just tries to be worthy. He succeeds too, most of the time.)

 

The now routinely approached trading of information and idea bouncing begins after the politically correct greetings have been made, everyone taking a previously assigned desk on their respective sides. Like debate teams fresh from high school, Peter thinks sardonically, the thought giving little comfort to the incongruent feeling seeping into his thoughts, burning his clarity into ash around the edges. He has chosen to stay at the back of the room, as far away from the machine as he can manage without alerting the rest of the people around him, least of all Olivia, that he’s not exactly feeling at the top of his game.

 

They’re dealing with the potential to heal otherwise irreparable inter-universal destruction here, he doesn’t want to bother them with the shock his mind is experiencing by being close to a part of his consciousness that has bilocated between the electrical impulses in his brain that make up his memories of the life he never lived and their actual source, his encrypted DNA in the machine’s mechanical cortex. It’s basically a short circuit in the making, the same electrical currents running in opposite directions and bound to clash against each other any minute.

 

He finds it ironic to think that Walter had made up that particular segment of the Thing by twisting technology developed by his alternate self to their own purposes, adding his own painful spice to the mix. Namely, he’d used the B-Lymphocyte memory implantation done on Olivia when she’d been held captive Over There. The concept of it, anyway.

 

Except he hadn’t had needles stabbed repeatedly into his flesh, he’d had electrical discharges of a particularly high voltage rip open his hippocampus to make space for the seamless puzzle piece of memory implanted there by the former iteration of himself. Like hijacking the programming in a very malleable computer hard drive; it had his fingerprints all over it. His levels of electric tolerance have always been lower than the average, Walter’s words, and Peter is not going to lie. It _had_ hurt like hell.

 

This isn’t much better, sensation wise, though the intensity is considerably more tolerable if increasing by the second. But it’s a step of the process he needs to go through, if Walter was to be believed, to achieve the actual closing of the circuit he’d started a timeline ago. He’d never doubted his dad, not in those last few days at least.

 

He pulls his pea coat tighter around himself, shoving his hands into his armpits as he stands, almost tiptoeing around the back of the room as he moves towards the coffee machine, hoping the caffeine might react to his benefit with whatever strange displacement phenomenon his body is being subjected to by the subconscious strain on his psyche. He feels like his head is splitting, almost like the hemispheres of his brain are being ripped apart slowly, like a Band-Aid peeled from wounded skin by a masochistic kid. Needless to say, it is anything but pleasant.

 

The plastic-and-metal contraption pours him a steaming Styrofoam cup of the murky liquid at the push of a button, the warmth suffusing into the clammy skin of his palms comforting but not enough to suppress the slight chattering of his teeth, nor the dizzy spell that has him leaning his head against the white washed Massive Dynamic stenciled wall at the back of the room. He can feel the walls closing in, like the scope of his vision. He closes his eyes.

 

The hand in the middle of his back startles him, the contact against the fabric of his clothes producing the smallest electrical surge, the tingling sensation culminating in the middle of his chest, right at his sternum. He knows without looking that the hand belongs to Olivia, his Olivia.

 

“Hey, are you alright?” she asks, the tinge of concern evident in her voice. He must have lost track of time, the cool surface of the wall relaxing, though he shivers still under her touch. It’s not every day that she allows herself to touch him, he must really look like hell.

 

“Just peachy,” he says, his voice strangled, what was a simple tingling in his chest now an unrelenting pressure that threatens to choke the very air from his lungs. He’s not so sure he’s going to be able to stand much longer.

 

“Peter,” she scolds in that soft, reproachful tone that’s just for him, “stop it, you look like you ate one of Walter’s experiments.”

 

“That good, huh?” he grinds out through the brick in his throat that might have been his pounding heart once, “one of the gross ones or the useful ones?” not that there was much difference.

 

“I’m serious, Peter,” she says, pushing his shoulder slightly to force him to turn away from the wall and into her. The moment her eyes connect with his face her eyes go wide, her complexion deathly pale as she attempts to swallow the tennis ball that has somehow come to reside between her vocal cords, “you’re…your nose is bleeding.”

 

Peter brings a hand up to his face, not having felt the trail of blood running down his face and into his beard, droplets hanging from his chin. He’d been expecting this since he came into the room; it’s the only thing he had been expecting about this whole thing to tell the truth. He finds it strange that it took this long. And his shirt is stained.

 

“Shit,” he curses, lightheaded, his thoughts disconnecting for a moment, “I love this shirt.”

 

Olivia touches his skin then, encircles his wrist with the cool circumference of her hand, clearly about to say something when he doubles over, clutching at his chest in pain. He doesn’t understand, at first, and then he remembers through the haze of the pain: It had not been a circuit of two. No man and machine combination. It had been a trifecta of impossibly aligned variables, and he had finally come in contact with the missing link.

 

He hears his name in the distance, the incessant shouting as everything collapses, the sounds warped and indistinguishable from one another in the ridiculously slow motion of the world. But maybe it is he who collapses. Only the green of her eyes remains.

 

“Crowbar,” he whispers in his last moment of clarity, clutching blindly at the collar of her neatly ironed coat.

 

Then the green turns to utter, impenetrable black and he says no more. His heart stops.

 

***

 

Olivia Dunham has never been one for moments of big reflection or ponderous thought (not this version of her anyway), but she guesses meeting yourself is one of those instances that warrant a redrawing of habits, perhaps a phenomenon reserved to the most peculiar of circumstances where she’s concerned. And this is definitely peculiar, to say the least. She should know.

 

It’s funny, she thinks as she looks at the figure of her fair haired double from across the bridge station, funny how wrong we can be about others when we don’t know the explicit details of their every day lives. Especially when _‘others’_ includes ‘ _yourself_ ’.

 

The other woman stands stiffly at the head of the emergency gurney that holds her resuscitated though still unconscious teammate as she waits for the ambulance to arrive through the chaos of New York traffic, something else that seems to be a multiversal constant. It had been a gift from Lady Luck that crazy Dr. Bishop had been fast enough in MacGyver - ing a defibrillator out of a few pieces of scrap machinery in the room and the variable power outlet on the wall, the latter courtesy of Massive Dynamic on their side. Had the old man not been as quick their (reluctant) joint task force might have been missing it’s newest integrant yet.

 

(She is sure that she’s not the only one impressed with his quickness of thought, though she figures things of the sort are expected from men such as Walter Bishop. Both of them)

 

What intrigues her at the moment though, is not Dr. Bishop’s skill.  Apparently, Mr. Rook is somehow partially awake; because she can see his head move a little from the space her double has vacated in moving to the side to better see his face. And what a surprisez: it’s not professionalism that colors the infinitely relieved look on the other’s face, or the way her hand runs through the would – be – curly hair on the side of his head. She knows these things. It’s _her_ face too.

 

She’s going to have _so_ much fun teasing her.

 

*

 

Peter is sure someone hammered his head into the floor. There’s a burning feeling in his chest, his eyes will barely open, and he feels like his whole body just went through a metal compactor before being stretched back out into something resembling his original shape. He feels…unstrung, if that makes any sense.

 

The moment his vision clears enough to distinguish more than colored bulks here and there his eyes fall on Olivia, her body immediately relaxing as she sees him regain consciousness (at least as relaxed as she can be with their little very – much – outside – of – protocol team surrounding them). He coughs, and the simple action feels like he’s gut has been kicked ten ways to Sunday.

 

“What…” he croaks, his throat sandpaper on hard wood. He’d been to the Sahara once, long ago. There really isn’t much difference in what a wasteland respects. There’s a cold sensation on his lips and he looks down to see her pressing an ice cube against his lips, he takes it, his body thankful for the moisture.

 

“You went into cardiac arrest,” she says, her voice professional, detached, but Peter knows professional is just a cover for her frustration, her worry. Her anger at him for hiding things from her, if her We’ll – talk – about – this – later look is anything to go by, “You were dead for a minute and fifteen seconds before Walter managed to shock your heart back into working again.”

 

Huh. One thing is certain: he is going to kill Walter. Right after he kisses him.

 

But of course, it was to be expected, even if he didn’t know it was going to happen. It was only natural that his death would be necessary to break his bond with the machine and therefore prevent him from making further use of it under any circumstances, now that he though of it with a little more clarity; it had always been intended to be a one – off anyway. He could have figured it out himself, had he been paying attention, but Walter should have told him nonetheless.

 

If this is Karma, Peter thinks, he must have done very bad things for a very long time in as many iterations as had come before his, because there was _no way_ _in hell_ that this was natural. Nonexistence, apparently, was not enough payment for his little stint at playing God. He’d had to die, too. Sometimes, being him really sucked.

 

“What happened to my clothes?” he asks, when he regains control over his vocal cords, surveying the remains of the badly cut undershirt balled in his lap, as well as the lack of buttons on his shirt. Pity, it really was his favorite.

 

“I cut them open for Walter to be able to work around,” she says, her expression somewhat sheepish around the ever present façade of professionalism about her.

 

“Couldn’t resist my well toned body, could you?” he asks, meaning to sound playful but coming out crabby instead.

 

She responds by turning away from him and directing the newly arrived EMT personnel towards the stretcher his body lies on, though he think he hears her mutter something like, “at least we know there’s no brain damage,” but he can’t be sure, his eyelids are too heavy, his thought process too slow as he falls once more into slumber. He figures he owes himself a rest anyway.

 

He can feel that space between them shrinking at a snail’s pace, day-by-day, inch-by-inch, and it might not quench the thirst that’s always there, nor dispel the empty feeling in his stomach that she leaves with her absence (The same emptiness that disappears with every touch, every hidden smile, every look she thinks he doesn’t notice), but he knows that the constant ache in his chest remains because she does.

 

It’s a pain he welcomes, for pain is life. As is she.

 

***

 

Olivia is worried still, afraid even, (terrified if she told the truth) though she only admits to the latter because the shifting, ghost – like quality of the glimmer that surrounds him makes it so glaringly obvious that not even her Olympic –level qualities for denial can mistake it for anything different.

 

She knows all this, as she sits beside his medication – relaxed form on the narrow metallic gurney of the ambulance, her hand on the side of his neck more for her own comfort than for his, his steady pulse beating softly under her fingertips. She might even suspect the reason she feels this way, not really something she’d like to address. But it is only later, in the chaotic loneliness of a home that should be safe haven and feels anything but, that she will wonder on the suddenly superimposed image of him that had flashed before her eyes in those few blood-stained seconds before his collapse.

 

Peter. Peter Bishop, his eyes red-rimmed and dark, hate and animalistic hunger seeping from his pores like the heavy sweat clinging to his skin, and to hers as he attempted to choke her against a wall, the hard planes of his body pressing against her with bruising force as ugly black veins snaked on the surface of his skin. The rims of his nostrils crusted with long-dried, purplish blood.

 

It feels familiar in the way a nightmare might after waking up from a restless night, the kind she’s too used to having to worry about.

 

It feels familiar, like reverse déjà vu.

 

Except it’s not.


	3. Shards Of Glass

“ Which way did she go?” Peter shouts for the hundredth time, making his aggravation known well above the steady thumping of the late spring rain on the hard asphalt beneath their feet. He’s not just shouting because he’s angry. He’s not angry.

 

He’s _pissed_.

 

He’s shouting because if he doesn’t he won’t be able to hear his voice over the mad pounding of his heart, which has managed to move a few centimeters upwards in the direction of his throat since he dashed out of Astrid’s borrowed black SUV, not two minutes ago.

 

“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that,” says a not – so – calm – anymore Captain Lincoln Lee, designated field officer in charge for the operation. It’s only natural, it’s his home territory after all, the colder than normal atmosphere and diminished oxygen percentage accentuating the fact that Peter finds himself in the one place he never wanted to set foot in again.

 

That Olivia is chasing down a group of shape – shifters that outnumbers her team, in an area she’s not familiar with, in the rain and with the very real possibility that one of said teammates is a shifter himself is not exactly helping to calm his nerves.

 

“WHERE. IS. SHE?” he bellows, fisting his hands in the slightly shorter man’s jacket as he shakes him. He looks wild, crazed, his pupils abysmal in the neon shadows of his face, his hair damp and mussed up in the windy rain that beats against them. He doesn’t feel much better. There’s nothing in him but anger, and the heart stopping fear that he might not see her again (he should know, he still has the burn marks from Walter’s improvised defibrillator, raw red and itchy on his chest. It’s been a month).

 

It’s a fear that’s always there, just a step behind him, waiting for the right moment to pounce and make him loose his composure, his sanity. A moment just like this one.

 

“ I don’t _know_!” Lincoln Lee shoves him away, hard. There is indignation plain as day on his face, and Peter has the fleeting thought that perhaps he’s not the only one worried. The _other_ is out there too, after all. But the grip of the panic in him is too strong for rational thought, and the sudden flash of sheer bewilderment reflected in the other man’s gaze just throws him further off balance. Perhaps crazy is indeed in his blood.

 

“What?” he says, indignant, the panic rising well beyond anything resembling healthy as he feels his blood boil, bubbling up under the thin surface of his skin, “How can you _not_ know where _you_ sent _your team_?” he enunciates every word, every syllable, as he attempts in vain to calm down, his breathing labored and harsh, as if he’d run twenty miles up a mountain, full throttle.

It wouldn’t really surprise him if he were to be the first recorded case of _actual_ spontaneous human combustion right this moment. Little surprises him anymore, and this is all kinds of fucked up anyway. Starting with the fact that they’re on the wrong side of the universe. He’s not comfortable in this place, it makes his skin tingle like he has a colony of ants crawling under his skin, his breathing _too_ synchronized, his being too in tune with his surroundings.

 

He doesn’t like to be reminded of the undeniable fact that his physical being belongs here because, in truth, _he_ doesn’t. Everything that makes Peter Bishop… Rook or whatever other name he chooses to have (names are just words and words can lie, but his very existence speaks of irrefutable truths) belongs to a fixed point in space -time, a single spark in the billions that illuminate the universes with life. That spark is a raging fire branded upon his skin, the skin beneath, the one he cannot shed, the mark made long ago, a thousand times over. Perhaps a thousand _timelines_ over too.

 

He cannot loose that spark for it makes his blood rush through his veins, gives air to his lungs and clarity to his thoughts. He’s nothing without it.

 

He cannot loose her. Not again.

 

He doesn’t even realize he’s been advancing threateningly on the other man until he feels the iron strength of a small hand pushing back against his sternum. He does not comprehend for a second, everything out of focus in his agitation, his brain short-circuited into single mindedness; until he _looks._ And there, keeping both of them away from beating each other, is Astrid.

 

“Guys!” She barks over the rain, stopping them, her touch strong, commanding, her normally indulgent brown stare reproving, like a mother that has found her children squabbling about without a motive, “Cut it _out_. You are not helping!” 

 

And just like that the coiled tension in Peter solidifies, gains a definite shape that he can manipulate and control, the blazing fury in him contained. He straightens, his mind clearing. Tethered. Perhaps he is, after all, Walter’s son. And perhaps he is indeed going crazy.

 

“Agent Lee,” Astrid begins, all business, “What do you mean you do not know their location, this is not a radio silent operation.” Peter wants to kiss the woman. He can’t even imagine where they would all be without her patience, her wisdom. Fringe Division would surely have made a spectacular stillbirth without her. Astrid is the tape holds their personal universe together.

 

Lee looks astounded, unaccustomed to have a socially functioning, field active version of his looker asking him a direct question, no less physically restraining him. All while looking him in the eye unflinchingly. It’s the first time Astrid has come over in any capacity and, Peter thinks, she’s handling it brilliantly.

 

“Liv’s cuff just suddenly went out of range no more than five minutes ago,” Lee explains, frustrated, running his hands through his spiky wet hair in distress. He _is_ worried after all. He’s just holding it together better than Peter himself. Out of a sense of duty perhaps, being obliged to remain aloof and in control by the weight of command. But then again, Peter rationalizes bitterly, Lincoln doesn’t have the imagine of the woman he loves lying lifeless on an autopsy table burned into his retinas, the dark red spot on her forehead the only trace the bullet ever left.

 

“Well, we need to _find_ them, and alert them,” Peter grates out from between clenched teeth, “We found the body of one of her team members.”

 

The look of realization on Lee’s face would’ve been something to laugh at, had Peter not felt like screaming right then. He simply nods, confirming without words the other man’s suspicions. They have just been led into an ambush.

 

And if their cuffs, their only means of communication, have no service in the area they might as well be screwed. He stops, replays his thoughts, Lincoln’s words, and looks at the massive compound behind them.

 

An idea forms inside his mind, sudden as the spark of flint against cold metal, setting him in motion.

 

_Out of range…hmm._

 

“Is there a map of the location?” he asks Lee, using the memory of a voice of command he never had the change to develop but that seems to work nonetheless, the man looking at him as if assessing before he nods, turning and leading them into a makeshift tent. The white plastic is incandescent to their eyes, the reflection of the fluorescent lighting used to illuminate the inside area making him shield his eyes like the mirroring of sunlight in late winter snows. Peter thinks of viruses, CDC’s decontamination zones and near death experiences. The antiseptic smell is not helping either.

 

Lincoln Lee leads them to what looks like their logistics central, an easily set – up table with heaps of equipment strewn on it. It’s all they might need in this universe’s twisted version of a not – so – secret stakeout, he guesses. From among the various gadgets, Lee brings forward a flat screen and directs them to come around to see it better, manipulating the icons on the surface with his fingertips until they can make out a virtual three-dimensional layout of all levels of the abandoned warehouse compound.

 

He has no idea what Peter has in mind, but any help is welcome at this point, and Lincoln has never been one to let his pride override his ability to fulfill his duty.

 

Peter fights the urge to snort in derision. It doesn’t matter what universe you’re in, clichés will be clichés, and there’s nothing as overdone as the raid in the forgotten warehouse in the middle of the shady suburb of an overpopulated metropolis. It almost reads as one of those bad procedurals shown at midnight on cable.

 

Except in television the good guys always win. Real life is not as equitable. In real life, it’s the heroes who die before the world can be saved and the bad guys who profit on their efforts. In real life, the board is divided in shades of grey, the absolutism of black and white a fictional concept subjected to ridicule.

 

In real life, there is no good, no bad. Only people, righteousness, ambition. And their penchant for one or the other.

 

He leans over the screens, quickly figuring out how to rotate the image and achieve the lateral view he had been looking for. The razor – sharp smile on his face would have scared him, had he been looking in the mirror. Bingo.

 

“Here,” he points, calling the others to attention, “This is why you can’t reach them.”

 

“A basement,” says Lee, steel in his voice, “The bastards led them to a basement” Peter looks at him, finds the same determination that runs through his veins reflected in the man’s eyes, a sense of kinship.

 

“I’m going with you.” Peter states, his voice far from leaving any room for argumentation.

 

Lincoln just nods. He knows.

 

**

 

Her legs are burning.

 

Olivia likes to run. She would even say it’s one of her better skills, one she’s confident in. Sleep has always been elusive, her rest easily disturbed, be it by work or by the unrelenting assailing of her nightmares, and she has found no better remedy to drown out the clamor of the monsters in her head than physical exertion, exhaustion. It usually leads to dreamless slumber and thus Olivia has been, for as long as she can remember, a consummated runner.

 

Which is why this is simply ridiculous.

 

She has been chasing the shifter for an inordinate amount of time through the labyrinthine corridors of the scarcely illuminated basement, thankful that Lincoln, her side’s Lincoln, had thought of finding the fuse box before they dove down here. And though she’s been running like her life depends on it, no small feat whatsoever, she seems to be unable to diminish the distance between herself and the jacketed humanoid ahead.

 

Olivia looks behind her, finding herself alone in the chase, having lost the rest of her team at some point in her haste to get to the _thing_ that had run off with the information they needed stored somewhere in his…person.

 

She looks ahead again, in time to jump over a fallen chair as the shifter turns a corner, momentarily moving out of her field of vision. She slows down gradually to a trot. Attentive, she draws her gun as she turns the corner. Nothing there. She stops.

 

She can hear the faint sounds of shouting behind her, thinks perhaps her team has caught up. She doesn’t turn, keeps walking forward into the half-light of the high-ceilinged grayness that makes the room.

 

The cold contact of the gun to the back of her head stops her. Her burning muscles turn to ice, her eyes closing. She tenses, her mind racing for an appropriate response to this specific scenario.

 

“Put the gun down,” says the scratchy voice behind her, as the hunter becomes the hunted.

 

“Okay,” she says, purposefully inflecting a waiver unto her words, “…okay” she crouches down slowly, the press of the metal to the back of her skull intensifying, ascertaining control, yes. But also alerting her of the tension in the man’s arm, the locked position of tendon and bone in his outstretched elbow.

 

Her gun touches the ground then, the hollow clunk of it as it comes to lie on rough, damp cement eliciting the reaction she had been waiting for. The arm relaxes, giving room for her head to move without the pistol digging into her flesh, if only slightly.

 

Slightly is all she needs.

 

Olivia ducks her head, twists to the side, under his gun arm. The sudden move is echoed by his finger pressing on the trigger, missing by a fraction of an inch. The shot rings in her ears. She elbows him with all her strength, the angle of her arm driving the impact under his ribcage and upwards, hitting his liver. It’s not a pleasant sensation, Olivia knows, it feels like someone just knifed you, the pain sharp, intense.

 

She wastes no time, straightens as she steps sideways and forwards, grabbing the inside of his wrist as she turns to face his back. She twists his arms upwards against his spine, kicks the gun away as it clatters to the ground, his grip forcibly slackened. The kick to the back of his knee is precise, effective as she pushes downwards, reaching for her discarded gun, still on the ground beside her. 

 

She shoots it in the head, the silvery shine of the mercury running away from his skull as it mixes with very red and clearly very human blood chilling the breath in her lungs.

 

She swallows, blinks. The sound of the rush of blood in her ears is deafening, like waves crashing against a rocky shore in the midst of a hurricane. She breaths deeply, runs a hand through her hair as she waits for her heart to stop hammering against her sternum, waiting for the adrenaline to ebb away so she can stop the exhilarated tremble of her limbs.

 

Her fingers are damp, and she brings them forwards to inspect the liquid that now coats them. Blood. Her own.

 

“Huh,” she murmurs, the bullet must have grazed her after all.

 

Someone shouts her name, the voice eerily familiar in it’s raw desperation.  She whips her head around, searching, and is met by the butt of a gun against her temple.

 

The echo of her name rings in her ears as her head hits the ground, and she knows that voice. _Peter,_ she thinks.

 

The dark closes in.

 

**

 

Peter hits the corner, almost slides to the ground before his shoulder hits the cement wall in front of him, shaking an avalanche of dust free with the impact, his momentum allowing him to keep running into the room as he shouts for her.

 

The moment he sees the very alive body of Agent Murdock behind Olivia’s standing form his mind and everything around him seems to freeze. He knows nothing has actually changed, only the way _he_ experiences the moment.

 

It’s a slight hiccup in his perception of time, the kind he’s starting to get used to.

 

He has come to the realization that he will probably never be truly in tune with the flow of time in this particular stream, be it in this universe or the one he has chosen for his own. It had been slightly disorienting at first, how things either stopped or moved forward more rapidly than he could follow in times of high stress, but he’s starting to recognize the moments and, when he can, use them to his advantage.

 

He would use this particular moment to _think_ , if he wasn’t already using every point of his 190 IQ to keep the creeping fear in his chest from putting him permanently out of commission before he can get his hands on the slippery bastard that has just pistol whipped his _wife._

 

(He forgets sometimes, is forced to remind himself that nothing is set in stone, that he’s determined to let her choose. He only hopes that one day she might choose him)

 

Peter lets instinct take over, taps willingly into the part of his mind that remembers the satisfaction of feeling the machinery in the biomechanical soldiers crunch to a stop with every stab to their spine, every well placed shot to the back of their heads.

His conscious mind, his _conscience_ perhaps, recoils at the unfurling darkness as it floods him, unfettered. But he takes one look at Olivia, lying on the ground with blood on her hair, and nothing matters anymore.

 

The rest happens in a flurry of motion.

 

He tackles the hybrid to the ground, his speed, his weight, and gravity doing the heavy lifting for him easily as he slaps the gun out of its hand, straddles it.

 

Peter has always been a good fighter; it’s a necessary skill to survive when you live on the move, always in the streets. It was a skill he had been forced to develop early. Having a smart mouth and a penchant for mixing himself with dangerous personas had certainly not done much to keep him out harm’s way in his early twenties. The odd bar fight had helped too.

 

Peter won’t lie to himself (at least not in this particular instance); he _is_ his father’s son. Both of them.

 

He can be an arrogant asshole when he wants to be, and the feeling of power that spreads through him, like ink on wet paper, with every impact of his knuckles against the thing’s flesh is exhilarating. He knows then, in that moment, that he is going to beat it to death.

 

But a proper fight needs two participants, and he finds, in a not – so – pleasant – way, that his opponent is not just going to lie there waiting for the finishing blow. Murdock grabs the lapels in his jacket, his strength inhuman as he brings Peter downwards, pushing him off balance as he rises up, head-butts him with a cranium made of something stronger than bone, reversing their positions.

 

He can feel the shifter’s hands squeeze into his throat, his head swimming as he tries to get a hold of its face, dig his thumbs into its eyes. He tries coughing, his legs kicking in involuntary spasms, flailing of their own accord.

 

Murdock chooses that moment to raise his upper body, moving to his knees to apply more of his weight into his choking hold, and Peter sees his chance.

 

He brings his leg up towards his body, plants the sole of his workman’s boots firmly against its chest, and kicks. Murdock flies above him, landing on its back with a muted thud.

 

Peter coughs, feeling the unmistakable taste of blood on his tongue as he swallows. He must have bitten it at some point.  He rolls onto his side, feels more than sees the shifter rise above him, already on the move. He guesses it helps to only be part human. It means you’ve only got half the weaknesses. He thinks _this is it,_ and lets his arms drop down. His hand brushes against something sharp. A piece of glass, thick and dusty and jagged.

 

The shifter pounces, and Peter brings his hands up, pushing. He feels the glass slide into flesh, shivering at the sensation, a thick mixture of blood and mercury running sluggishly down his fingers as the thing’s strength falters slightly, it’s hold slackened. Peter rolls them over in a flash, lunges for the gun behind him and shoots, hitting it on the center of the chest as the shifter manages to stand, pulling the makeshift dagger from its gut.

 

It stumbles backwards and Peter rises to his feet, breathing heavily as he steps forward. He shoots again, hitting the kneecap, and it falls to the ground, on its knees.  It coughs, blood gurgling in its throat as it looks up at him, trying to say something.

 

Peter presses the gun against its forehead, and shoots again.

 

**

 

They reach the back of the room at a run as the last shot rings in the air, Olivia on point, her red hair a flaming torch against the shadows of the corridor. She stops at the threshold, her movement sudden, and it’s only Capitan Lee’s attention to his partner’s penchant for abrupt movements that they all somehow manage not to barrel into her.

 

The sight in front of them is not one anyone expected, except perhaps Lincoln himself.

 

Rook kneels on the ground, his still – wet clothes now streaked with silver and dark splotches of bloody crimson in equal measure, his knuckles beaten to raw flesh as he runs them through Agent Dunham’s cheeks, shaking her shoulder softly to wake her up from her stupor. Her head cradled on his lap in the half-light of the room.

 

Lincoln Lee smiles sadly to himself, understanding the other man’s pain, glad that he got there in time. He knows he would’ve done the same, had it been Liv lying limply on the ground. He understands, and so he hopes that this man that he has not yet properly met has better luck than he has ever had. Perhaps one of them might have a chance at getting the girl.

 

He shakes his head; turns back out to call the clean up team into action, hauling a nosy Liv behind him by the arm, leaving his counterpart in the vicinity to care for his own team members. They deserve a little privacy, especially with the way Rook is looking at the still unconscious woman in his arms.

 

All he can do now is hope, for the man’s sake, that she’s ok.

 

**

 

 

Olivia opens her eyes, her eyelids fluttering slightly for a moment. She groans, and Peter feels the air he had been missing rush back into his lungs.

 

She clutches at him, alarmed, trying to twist her head to look around her, orient herself. Peter slides an arm under her shoulder, moving his hand to the back of her neck to cradle her head as he helps her sit up against his chest.

 

“Shhh,” he murmurs in her ear soothingly, his nose against her temple, “It’s okay, you’re okay honey, you’re okay.” He doesn’t really know which one of them he’s reassuring. She relaxes slightly against him, scrunching her eyes in pain as her head pounds, holding onto the collar of his shirt as she rides the sensation to its end.

 

Her gaze falls on his hands, warm and sticky against her cheeks, but it’s not the feeling that matters, it’s the blood that coats them and the undeniable swelling of his scratched knuckles.

 

“You’re hurt,” she mumbles dazedly, grabbing the hand not around her in her own, feeling absently for broken bones with a single-mindedness characteristic of the drunk. Or the recently concussed for that matter.

 

He chuckles in her ear, wincing in pain when she touches a rather tender spot. His hands will bruise nicely by the morning.

 

“Says the woman with the concussion,” he jokes, simply _happy_ that she’s alright, warm and breathing in his arms, “It’s just a scratch.”

 

“Uhuh,” she says, her eyes closing of their own accord against his chest as she moves her hand to his shoulder, and as much as he’d be willing to stay here all night he knows they need to make their way out of this stinking dungeon.

 

“Think you can stand?” he asks, pressing a small peck to her unmarred temple, moving away from her slightly. She nods of course, but he knows that doesn’t mean the answer to his question is yes.

 

Predictably, she staggers the moment he lets her stand on her own two feet, but he grabs her waist before much damage can be done. He weaves his arms around her shoulders; the back of her knees, and lifts before she has the time to protest. She never did weigh much.

 

“Peter,” she whines, and the fact that she _whines_ lets him know she _really_ did hit her head hard, he bites his lip to stop from smiling, “I can walk”

 

“You mean you can _stumble,”_ he says, serious, worry at the actual extent of her injuries raising its ugly head at him once more. He needs to check her up, but he has to get her someplace else, someplace _dry_ for that, knowing that even in her dazed state she won’t allow the mere idea of going to a hospital from leaving his mouth. She’s always hated hospitals. He understands, always having felt the same himself. 

 

“It’s faster this way,” he murmurs, and for once, she agrees.

 

Astrid, bless her soul, directs them to a row of government issued SUV’s the moment his feet get them clear of the warehouse compound and into the now light drizzle of the rain falling from the cloudy night sky, (Even the stars are different, here) the drivers ready to take their team to the prepaid hotel they’ll be staying the night in, courtesy of The Fringe Division and, by extension, the Department of Defense itself.

 

 _Thank you, Walter_ ; Peter thinks sardonically, Olivia’s head heavy on his shoulder as she dozes in the gray leather backseat of the car. He rubs his ring finger, a nervous habit he can’t seem to break out of, leans his head back against the headrest and looks at the buildings rushing past them out the window.

 

Before he knows it, the beret clad junior agent at the wheel announces that they have arrived, explaining that they have already been checked inn and handing him the keys for their respective bedrooms. Not like he’s planning on leaving her alone tonight, but the junior doesn’t need to know that.

 

He asks the junior for his first – aid kit, unsure if the rooms will come with one and the man dutifully hands him the supply box always kept in the car for injuries of mild urgency. Peter thanks him, picking Olivia up gingerly, reluctant to wake her but knowing he’ll have to, to tend to her wounds and get her out of her dirty, wet clothes and into something dry. There’s no way in hell he’s letting her spend the night like that.

 

The rooms turn out to be adjacent to each other, right in front of Lincoln’s and Astrid’s, both asking if they can help in any way, both refused. Astrid just shakes her head, a small, knowing smile on her lips. Lincoln is more reticent. Peter is not surprised, he has always suspected the man has a slight crush on Olivia, but he can’t hold it against him. This time _Lincoln_ is her partner, not him.

 

This time, Peter Bishop does not exist, and Peter Rook is no more than a necessary intruder. He’s a tool, a rare commodity.

 

He had always thought that the inordinate amount of funding for the Division on this side couldn’t all go into technology, and the room he finds himself standing in only serves to confirm his suspicions. It’s nothing short of a small suite; equipped with a king sized bed and a very comfortable looking (thank whomever) couch that he’ll be glad to spend the night on.

 

 

He walks them to the bathroom, half – awake Olivia heavy in his tired arms as he deposits her carefully on the edge of the wide tub, making sure of her stability before moving to strip of his own pile of dirty clothes, removing everything minus his boxers and shoving the garments to a corner before washing his hands thoroughly, wincing at the sting of the soap on the wounds marring the backs of his hands.

 

He turns around to find Olivia staring at him, heavy lidded and swaying slightly where she sits. He’d blush but the way she shivers inside her clothes assures him that it’s the concussion acting up and not a conscious reaction to his semi –nude state. She must not even think him someone to be stared at anyway, he thinks, he’s just convenient. In the wrong place, at the wrong time. As always. He never did know what she’d seen in him in the first place.

 

He’s since convinced himself that her attention had been but a stroke of fortune, perhaps, nothing more.

 

“I’m gonna need your help here,” he tells her, shoving his hands under her armpits to help her stand, her hands on his shoulders for balance as he goes for the buttons of her jacket with a swiftness that betrays his familiarity with the action.

 

He reaches behind her, turns the shower on, the temperature set hot but not to burning. He doesn’t want to shock her, seeing as she’s not hypothermic, just cold.

 

Peter strips her down, his actions clinical, as dispassionate as he can make any touch he places against the alabaster of her skin, not wanting to make of this something it’s not. He steps into the shower, bringing her with him and turning her against the water. He hugs her against him, lets her head rest lightly against his chest, praying that her confused state will prevent her from recognizing the reaction of his body to hers as he separates the blood-matted locks of her hair in the warm water, cleaning it as best he can without using shampoo he knows would sting with her wounds, superficial as they are.

 

 The stinging will come later, when her head is clean and she has stopped shaking.

 

He loses track of time, just stands there with her in his arms, his fingers running through her hair, unknotting it into its natural smoothness. At some point, her hands make their way around him, her fingers curling against his spine. He feels the soft feathery touch of her lips against his pulse point and he freezes, waiting to she what she makes of it. But she just stays there, and he knows.

 

She’s counting heartbeats.

 

It’s something he remembers her being fond of doing, remembers her face as he’d wake up in those rare morning to her lips pressed against his neck, her fingers keeping time with his heart against his ribs. He’d always skip a beat upon waking when it happened, and she’d always blush and laugh, her low chuckle resonating against his skin.

 

He’s beginning to understand a way in which a man would convince himself to remove pieces of his brain, pieces of his memory. Memory is cruel, dangerous, unforgiving.

 

Memory hurts, when you hold it in your arms but can’t seem to keep it.

 

She kisses his collarbone then, and he doesn’t move. She kisses his chest, burnt and red and soft under her lips, and he doesn’t move. She kisses his jaw, her fingers brushing upwards against his stubble as they splay on the arc of his cheekbone, and still he does not move. Only when her lips touch his, her touch tentative, exploratory, is he compelled into motion.

 

He reciprocates in kind, his touch no more and no less that what she bestows upon him, his own hands unmoving on her hips, neither pressing her against him nor pushing her away, letting her determine every aspect of whatever it is she’s doing.

 

The bite on his shoulder is unexpected, making him shudder, her fingernails scratching paths of fire as they run downwards on his back, her hand resting on the small of his back, her fingers playing with the hem of his drenched boxer shorts before pushing them down to pool around his ankles.  He moves then, grabs her head in his hands and kisses her, really kisses her for the first time in months.

 

(This is as close as they’ve been after that night in his apartment, after he’d told her who he was. Who _she_ was.)

 

And as she tightens her hold against his biceps, rising up to meet his fervor stroke for stroke, he tightens his hold on _her_ , a simple instinctual reaction. She winces in pain, his fingers digging into her bruised temple inadvertently.

 

He jumps backwards as if burnt, an apology ready on his lips, only to find that she has followed his body’s motion with her own, drowning out his protests with her lips, as if nothing had happened.

 

“ ‘Livia,” he murmurs against her mouth, “stop, you need to stop”

 

Her hands trail down his chest, her from rippling against his, her nails scratching in a caress that would serve to drive him crazy any other day, but the pained sound echoes still inside his mind. On repeat, and with eidetic clarity.

 

He shakes her hold on him, grabbing her hands in his as he takes a step away from her, his back inches from the tiled wall.

 

“ _Olivia, stop_.” he says, his voice strangled, “I can’t do this. Not like this.”

 

“Not like what?” she asks, befuddled at his reaction when he was more than clearly willing not a minute ago. Somewhere in the back of her mind, the sting of rejection echoes.

 

“Not when you’re like this,” he says, “not when I can hurt you just by touching you.”

 

“Peter,” she says, her voice almost back to its normal, sober cadence. Almost, “I’m fine, you didn’t hurt me.”

 

“Fine?” he asks, bewildered, his eyes wide, “Fine, Olivia? You’ve got a _concussion_ for fuck’s sake; you’re swaying on you feet when I’m not holding you and you think you’re _fine_? I think you need to redefine your concept of that goddamned word.”

 

“ Well, _I_ think you’re overreacting,” she says, her body flushed, her face regaining some semblance of her stoic composure.

 

“Overreacting,” he states, incredulous, his voice low as he drops her hands before balling his own into fists, “I rushed down into that basement to find you unconscious, and about to be shot. _Look_ at yourself, and then tell me I’m overreacting.”

 

“I never asked you to go!” she says, her voice rising, and he knows it only because of her still dazed state that she lets go of her emotions this easily. He doesn’t know if he should be worried, or relieved, “I never asked you to do _anything_ for me, I was _perfectly fine_ before you decided to come crashing into my life, you myopic jackass.”

 

(A small voice inside her head reminds her that she didn’t have much of a life without him in the first place. The same voice that calls her liar)

 

Peter simply stops, blinks. His mind goes blank, his body rigid. His eyes are wide as he swallows, her words reverberating in his ears. He inhales sharply, screwing his eyes shut for a moment. She might as well have slapped him, it would’ve hurt much less.

 

He opens his eyes then, pools of molten blue reaching out to her, and she sees everything. All the worry, all the hurt she has just caused him, and she recoils, the intensity of emotion etched in his gaze like a punch in her gut. He smiles a ravaged smile as he straightens, the tension ebbing away as he stands to his full height, towering slightly above her.

 

“I know,” he murmurs thickly, because he does, because she’s right. She could have had a stab at something normal someday, had he not reached out. She would have been alive fifteen years into that future that never was; had he too died as a child like was supposed to. Like the Peters of this timeline so dutifully had. Had he remained nonexistent perhaps the shadows of guilt and pain would never have made a home behind her eyes. And maybe, just maybe, she would have had a happy life, “…I’m sorry.”

 

Olivia looks away, unable to withstand the sheer hurt exuding from his pores, uneasy with the beginnings of the glimmer refracting on his skin and every surface around them. Reminding her of how wrong all of this is. Reminding her of fear, and the insidious feelings that grow inside her chest with every look he directs her way, every stare he thinks she doesn’t notice.

 

Peter reaches behind her, turns the water off and leads her out of the shower with a careful hand against her elbow; avoiding as much contact as he can as he helps her stabilize. He grabs a towel, dries her from the bottom up, his movements brisk, purposeful, until not a drop of water coats her skin.

 

He’s a lot more gentle with her hair, rubbing the towel in soft circular motions against her scalp until he’s satisfied with his handiwork, never once looking at her face, his gaze fixed on a spot beyond her, right above her shoulder. His silence is disquieting.

 

The bathrobe is soft against her skin, warm, and big as he knots it closed around her waist pushing her to sit on the edge of the tub once again. He wraps another towel around his waist then, leaves the bathroom for a moment, to come back with a red first –aid kit filled to the brim with creams, and bandages, and little instruments she’s never seen before.

 

Somehow, he makes sense of it all, dipping the end of a cotton swab into a clear substance and spreading it evenly against her cuts. She yelps at the burning sensation, surprised, and he freezes, looks at her as if waiting for permission to continue but he does not speak.

 

“It’s ok,” she whispers, and he moves again, not saying anything as he continues with his ministrations against her skin, touching the bump in the side of her head gingerly to appreciate the extent of the injury, apologizing once more when she winces against his touch.

 

He repacks everything neatly in its place, placing the kit to the side as he stands picking her up into his arms before she realizes what he’s doing.

 

“Save it,” he says, his voice more tired than anything, making words of protest catch in her throat as she proverbially bites her tongue, too weary herself to fight him any longer. He deposits her gently on the bed, pulling the covers over her before stepping back.

 

He stares at her, lost, feeling his mouth open and close as he fights to say something, anything, but the words refuse to come out. He brushes a hand down his face; wishing things could be simpler, easier. But then he reminds himself; it wouldn’t be _them_ if they were.

 

(He resists the urge to laugh at himself then, at his willingness to believe there ever was such a thing, somewhere in this mess he’d made.)

 

He sighs, moves to the couch and lies on his back, staring at the mute blackness of the ceiling, a child’s prayer not to dream upon his lips.

 

Olivia closes her eyes against the pillow, burrowing into the covers to repel the chill that has settled in her bones, trying in vain to forget the look of raw agony on his face.

 

She never meant to hurt him; the words had just tumbled out of her mouth, unrestrained, unfiltered.  She never meant to hurt him, but part of her wants him to hate her for all she’s put him through, for every gesture she doesn’t allow herself to reciprocate, every feeling she’s too afraid to recognize, to put a name to. Wants him to realize that he’d be better off alone that with the train wreck of failure and regret that makes her who she is.

 

Peter is noble, and caring, and steadfast and she does not deserve anything like him. Maybe she had, once, but she’s not that woman, no matter how hard she wishes she could be.

 

Moreover, he doesn’t deserve to be stuck with a broken, second rate version of the woman he had so clearly loved.

 

The truth is, Olivia has always known that she would end up alone, no matter how much she’d wish otherwise. There have been…interludes, small moments in time where she’s deluded herself into believing that someone could walk with her, when all others walked behind her, but that’s all it’s ever been: an illusion, a mirage upon the desert of her skin.

 

The reason is right there, in the ghost light occupying the vacuum between them, running through her veins. She’s been made into a soldier, formed as a fighter, a protector. But her makers never deemed fit to include _this_ into her job description.

 

Olivia Dunham is not made to be loved, simple as that.

 

(Day 74)


	4. An Interlude (Of Sorts)

Olivia cradles her head in her hands for the umpteenth time that evening. Her elbows propped up on the lab table before her, its usually aseptic surface littered with pages from the case’s file in a pattern visible only to her eyes, she feels like her head could burst any minute.

 

In her line of work, that particular thought is less figurative than she’d like.

 

She knows it’s normal, after her multiple head injuries (because, as Peter had so eloquently put it, being grazed by a bullet, getting pistol whipped, and then having her head hit the ground under her own weight without a buffer, on the same day, definitely counted as _multiple_ ) at the warehouse almost a month ago. Walter had told her the headaches could last for months, as well as the rare but irritating dizzy spells she still has when getting up from bed too fast, and the ringing in her ears whenever her surroundings go from loud to silent.

 

It might be normal, but that doesn’t make her feel any less useless, sitting at the lab all day because the constant rustling around in the office is too loud, her nose buried in documents and reports as she tries to make heads or tails of their latest case. She sighs. She only needs to wait one more week before Broyles reinstates her to actual fieldwork, which has been denied her except under cases of utmost importance.

 

“Utmost importance” usually meaning anything related to the other universe, which has been oddly calm for the past few weeks. It makes her wonder what sort of calamity might be coming next. If the past three years, in which she has known no true peace, have taught her something it is that tranquil moments of the sort only amount to the calm before the storm.

 

The well – defined warmth of a hand pressed against the base of her neck startles her. It’s weight is familiar, distinctive; the soft yet purposeful stroking of the thumb at the thin layer of skin on her bare nape as tender as any touch she’s ever received.

 

There’s no mistaking who the hand belongs to, when the mere contact has successfully distracted her enough from the symptoms of an oncoming migraine that she’s able to simply _breathe_ and release the tension in her shoulders, her upper body sagging forwards imperceptibly. They are particularly dangerous, she muses, these things he does to her without forethought.

 

“Hey,” he greets, his voice lower than usual in deference to what he has come to recognize over the past month as Olivia’s _pins – and – needles – in – my – brain_ posture. The least he’s ever wanted to do is hurt her. In any way.

 

“Hey, yourself” she gives him back, finally raising her head from the cocoon of her hands, raising an eyebrow at the nondescript white bag he’s set before her on the table, his thigh propped up on the edge. She cocks her head, a slight frown marring her features.

 

“I thought your head could use a break,” he explains simply, “ and you’ve hardly eaten anything after the three cups of coffee you chugged this afternoon”

 

The way he understands her with just a look in her direction is more than a little eerie in her mind, but not unwelcome. It’s just one more thing that makes Peter who he is, as well as that exasperatingly overprotective streak that sees the light on rare occasions. The important ones.

 

“I’m not hungry,” she says, and she really isn’t. She’s never had an urge to eat, only doing so if and when she remembers that she needs to, and the health standard of three meals a day has hardly ever applied to her. It’s just one more of those things that makes her slightly different, slightly rougher around the edges, slightly more freakish than the rest of the world. She’s used to it.

 

“You never are,” he deadpans, his low tone unchanged. She looks back at the bag, studies the invisible patterns in it to avoid the blue storm of his eyes, his worry, “but you need to eat, ‘Livia.”

 

She just smiles slightly, a tiny thing really, still looking away, but it’s a sign that he’s getting through. It’s moments like these that make him thankful for his ability to read her, to know when to push, when to pull, and how. Most of the time anyway. He’s always in for a surprise when it comes to her.

 

“C’mon,” he says with a slow smile, nudging his foot against her hip, “It’s Indian, you can’t say no to Indian.”

 

She shakes her head, knowing he’s right, the littlest part of her resenting his seemingly absolute knowledge of her. Resenting the fact that she _wants_ that knowledge of him, too.

 

This isn’t the first time he brings her food at the lab, not by a long shot, but she can’t deny that this particular instance feels more like a peace offering than a simple gesture stemming from concern. Their interactions have been…strained the past weeks, on both their parts. She can hardly look him in the eye anymore, and she hates it. She’s never been a coward before.

 

 Above all, it’s a peace offering that should be hers to make. 

 

“Well, if it’s Indian,” she relents, standing up, her eyes soft when she looks at him, helping him clear the tabletop and arranging the papers in a neat pile on the bench beside her as he unpacks the carefully wrapped food. It does smell delicious, she concedes. Besides buttered toast (the way her mom used to make it), Indian is probably the only thing she’d eat with gusto, anytime.

 

He just looks back as he sets the table, distributing the packages of food between them. His grin widens, and she loves the lines on his face; they belong there, in his warmth. She really should stop staring.

 

“What?” he asks, his grin fading to a small, amused smile as he sits across from her, ready to dig in.

 

She shakes her head minutely, mentally berating herself, “Nothing, this actually looks good is all.”

 

He puts a hand to his chest in mock dismay, going along with her subtle evasiveness, “Agent Dunham, you insult me! I have been known for my exquisite taste, I tell you, this is Indian like you’ve never had, just wait and see!”

 

Olivia laughs, truly laughs, and he laughs with her; but somewhere inside she can’t help the stinging feeling of hearing him call her something other than her name. She knows he’s joking, just trying to cajole her out of obsessing over her work for a few minutes, but the words bring back the echo of his voice, from that first mistake and the sleepless nights that followed.  She lowers her eyes, concentrates on the food and hopes to keep her composure.

 

The food _is_ delicious. The spices in their right measure, the texture exquisite, and he’s right: she has never had food like this. She comments on it, and he shrugs, his eyes twinkling.

 

“I know a guy who knows a guy…” he leaves off, setting his head on his hand, elbow placed firmly on the metal surface of the table between them as he takes a swig out the beer bottle he’d taken from the fridge.

 

 “Another one of your criminal associates?” she asks, chuckling, absentmindedly leaning in. She doesn’t know how he does it, how he makes her forget the world and it’s problems, if only for a moment. He’s too much for her to absorb sometimes, the warmth he radiates towards her coating her skin, permeating her personal space with his easy charm.

 

There’s this brilliance to him, under the cynicism and the sadness in the back of his eyes, that is far from being exclusively intellectual, though his genius is undeniable and just as characteristic. He’s like slow fire, burning his mark into everything he touches, making his way under her skin with the patience of a saint, the devotion of a martyr.

 

He leaves something of him behind with every day that passes, little things all of them, until Olivia feels him everywhere.

 

Frankly, she’s afraid of the feeling.

 

She’s afraid because he makes her feel more like herself than she ever has, because he makes her feel human.  Makes her feel more like a woman than anything or anyone ever has. She doesn’t do feminine, not with her job description (and lets face it, she has no life beyond her job), but Peter makes her feel desired, and desirable, nonpareil. She’s afraid because she wants it, because she wants him, for far more than comfort, far more than an outlet to the horrors they revisit day by day. She’s afraid because it makes her feel greedy, selfish.

 

She knows that she can’t have him, and that is perhaps her biggest fear: getting too involved, too attached. She’s afraid that, in the end, she might not be able to let him go, let him be happy. She’s afraid that one day he’ll finally see the monsters beneath her skin and never forgive her for it.

 

He chuckles at her question, mischief in the wrinkles of his eyelids that make him look boyish, rogue, like he knows he can grab the entire cookie jar and get away with it.

 

“No, actually,” he says, taking another swig from his beer, “this is a much more innocent acquaintance.”

 

“Oh, really?” she asks, always curious, always seeking to establish some form of balance in their knowledge of each other. He knows too much, she knows too little, “do tell.”

 

“See, after my father got sick …” he raises an eyebrow at her, willing her to understand that he can’t speak that freely about it with Walter in the next room, “After my father got sick, my mother and I ended up in a pretty difficult situation. I was in high school, barely a freshman, and my mother had to work two jobs to maintain us, we had to sell the house I grew up in. She was a very good woman, a very good mother, but the pressure was sometimes…overwhelming.”

 

Olivia nods, understanding, letting him know he’s gotten his point across and biding him to continue.

 

“So I had this classmate, this little, nerdy Hindu boy that always sat at the front of the class. It came up, one day, that his parents – both of them immigrants – where struggling with their restaurant, had had to move to a smaller space and where thinking about shutting down their delivery service because the college kids who worked as errand boys asked for too much. I figured, what the heck, I needed the money anyway, so I showed up there one day and told the couple that I’d be their delivery boy, for half of whatever they had been paying they guy they had let go, I worked for them until I dropped out of school. It was the most stable job I ever had before the FBI came along.” He finishes, his posture relaxed, his body propped up on his forearms as he leans forwards against the table.

 

“I take it we’re talking about this same restaurant?” she asks, treasuring every word of knowledge he spills across the table.

 

He nods, “the son owns it now, they’re pretty big in their area,” he says, looking at her curiously then, as if debating with himself on the wisdom of what he wishes to say, “I could take you sometime, if you’d like.”

 

Olivia looks at him, surprised, and finds nothing but seriousness in his eyes. She looks away, bites the inside of her lip, “Peter, I…”

 

“It’s OK,” he says, not letting her finish, a smile on his face but no spark in his eyes, “I get it. Here, hand me that would you?” he points to her empty plate, standing. She piles up her plastic utensils, passes them to him and watches his retreating back as he dumps them in the trashcan at the back of the lab.

 

*

 

Peter sighs, wondering why he still puts himself in this particular situation when it is perfectly obvious that she doesn’t want to have anything to do with him outside of work. He’s not stupid. He knows she has to feel _something_ , or this awkward tension between them would have a decidedly different flavor.

 

She has to feel _something_ , because she wouldn’t have taken him to bed again, after that one time, if it were otherwise. But whatever it is she feels, it’s not enough for her to want to think that he could be something other than a diversion from the living nightmares of her life. 

 

Then again, they haven’t really done anything outside of work since he came clean with her, that night in his tiny hole of an apartment (he has neither seen her nor heard from her outside of their work schedule). Excepting of course the little incident after the warehouse disaster, which he’d managed to rein in before they made a bigger mess of themselves. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted her then, the mere supposition was a laughable concept. He _always_ wanted her.

 

 It was that he hadn’t wanted to physically hurt her, even inadvertently, much less see the regret and mortification that were sure to be there on her face, had she awoken in his arms. They’d never really spent the night together; he’d always left before he had the chance to break her a little more. And perhaps it was cowardly of him, to not want to see the pain and the bone-deep remorse his presence caused written in her eyes, but he’s never considered himself brave in the first place.

 

He is just stubborn, and that is one thing the years haven’t changed. He’d vowed to always be there, to support her, to love her in any way she’d let him, long before he’d said the words as he put a ring on her finger. And he plans to hold onto that vow if it kills him.

 

The tabletop is already littered in papers again by the time he makes his way back to her, her figure tense, that adorable little wrinkle between her eyebrows as she concentrates on her reading, her glasses perched on the bridge of her nose as if they’d never left. She has that ability, to make everything seem as if nothing had ever happened, erasing him from her surroundings as easily as he’d come.

 

She’s standing, walking around the table as she reads previously highlighted phrases on the reports, reorganizing the invisible pattern made of ink against white paper as new thoughts form inside her head, like puzzle pieces that, if correctly arranged, will show a definite picture.

 

Peter has always liked watching her work.

 

He likes the way she manages to look at a problem from all angles; even the less than conventional ones, the ones usually relegated to science fiction novels or, in their case, Walter’s more than probable fantasies. He likes the way she lets her imagination fill in the blanks, the chain of events unfurling inside her mind, almost like her thinking it might make it real. She’s rarely wrong.

 

He likes the way she works. He also enjoys distracting her while at it.

 

Which is why, against all rationality, he reaches his hand out to her hip, stopping her motion.  

 

“Peter?” she startles slightly, half – turning to face him, her hand going to the top of his biceps on reflex, her response to him like a deep engrained instinct. He steps closer, grabbing the hand she still has against the table’s edge in his own before moving back, bringing her with him.

 

“Hmmm?” he responds absentmindedly, both hands on her waist as he brings her forwards, against him, worming his thigh between her own.

 

She looks at him strangely, feeling slightly self-conscious under his heavy lidded stare, his serene albeit mischievous expression, “what are you doing?” she asks softly, her shoulders stiff.

 

“I’m distracting you,” he says easily, nonchalant, bringing his hand up to her face, his finger tapping against the tip of her nose with a feather light touch before he hooks it under her reading glasses, taking them away from her face and placing them haphazardly somewhere on the table behind her.

 

She should feel affronted, angry perhaps, at his unabashed manhandling, but she knows he doesn’t mean to be presumptuous. She’s tired of fighting him and strangely enough, she trusts him. So far, he’s proven to be more than worthy of it.

 

“I thought that was the point of the food?” she says, and it comes out more as a question than a statement. She knows she should move away, put some distance between them before there’s no longer anything professional about this.

 

That’s the moment the insidious voice in the back of her mind chooses to remind her that Peter stopped being a coworker the day she all but dragged him into bed with her, a mistake that, albeit stemming from her loneliness and the alcohol in her veins, was nonetheless all hers.

 

Peter moves then, his thigh pushing forward between her own in a smooth movement, her feet following his motion fluidly in response, in time with the contact of the side of his hip against hers. One of his hands moves to rest on the small of her back, pressing her stomach against his own so that she feels every small movement with perfect clarity against her flesh.

 

“No, the point of the food was to feed you,” he says like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, “If _I_ don’t do it, who will?”

 

They move in a half – circle together, his steps slow, rhythmic, and it downs on her what it is he’s doing. What she’d been too distracted by his sudden closeness to notice. She smiles in spite of herself, slightly bemused.

 

“Are you…are you _dancing_ with me?” she asks, her brow furrowing slightly, placing a hand against his chest, over his heart that keeps rhythm with the way his body sways against hers, the motion almost too slow. Almost.

 

“I would have thought that was obvious,” he says, his cheek brushing slightly against the top of her head, and the low tone of his voice is not so much due to her injuries and more because the intimacy of this stolen moment demands it; more because of the way her hips shift against his, in perfect synchrony with his movements, and the nigh imperceptible tightening of her hand on his arm.

 

Olivia has to roll her eyes at that; the man can be full of himself sometimes, that’s a fact. It doesn’t bother her nearly as much as it should. She lets the swaying motion lull her, the tension in her muscles dissipating as the warmth of his embrace seeps into her. She rests her head against his shoulder, letting herself get wrapped up in him as her eyes close of their own accord.

 

She can feel Peter tighten his hold on her a little more then, both of his hands splayed on her back as he swallows heavily, leaning his head back to look at the ceiling, as if he might find the answers to the universe there. His touch is firm, insistent but not possessive, his arms loose, ready to let go at any indication that she’s uncomfortable, shifting in accordance to the constant feedback of her reactions. Just like him.

 

He’s humming something, the tune familiar in a way that reminds her of the feel of his larger hand on hers, of the slow burn of whiskey down her throat, and the creaking of old stairs beneath her feet, like an old memory that she can’t quite grasp in its entirety. It leaves her tranquil, serene, and she wonders, standing in his arms, if this is what peace feels like.

 

“Peter?” she calls, raising the hand on his arm to brush against his neck, feeling the rolling motion beneath soft skin as she breaks his reverie, his head coming down to look at her with a curious expression.

 

“Yeah?” he asks, and she feels his breath across her cheek. His eyes are lazy pools of stormy blue; the shade you’d find in the shallows of a beach after a hurricane, the sand not quite settled, the hue not quite pure yet compelling.

 

“I like…” she starts, struggling, wondering what she can say to keep things simple, to avoid hurting him more, when the fact is that she can’t keep him, “I think I like _this._ ”

 

She knows he has understood her meaning by the way his arms loosen further around her, his shoulders dropping minutely as his hands leave her back to rest once more on her waist. She can’t help but feel the loss, but maybe it’s better this way. Maybe by hurting him now, in this small but significant way, he’ll learn to stay away and have a shot at a life without the burden of her own.  She has to close her eyes, hating the ghostlike quality of his skin as he begins to glimmer.

 

Peter stops moving, cups her cheek in his hand as she raises her head from his shoulder, looking anywhere but at him, their faces inches from each other, “I know,” he says, and closes the space between them.

 

His lips are soft, yielding, warm as they slide against hers in a different kind of dance, his fingers now on the edge of her jaw, behind her ear, against the back of her neck, his thumb stroking slowly at the corner of her mouth, where it meets his.

 

“I’m not going anywhere, Olivia,” he says, a daring cadence to his voice, and she wonders if mind reading comes as a side effect of the Machine too, or if she simply is that easy to read for him.

 

Her phone rings, and she has no time to think anything else. She moves away from him, his arms releasing her with ease as she grabs for her phone, moving on the table among the sea of paper strewn on it.

 

“Dunham,” she answers, her back to him, and Peter can see the lines of tension reappear, her posture straightening, as she nods at whatever the person on the other side of the line is telling her.

 

She finishes the call with “Yes, sir, I’ll be right there,” and Peter shoves his hands in his pockets, sighing at the ceiling before looking back at her.

“I – that was Broyles,” she says, her voice not quite back to professional, not meeting his eye, “Lincoln and Astrid brought Cooper in for interrogation.”

 

She’s briefing him, and as such he simply nods, straightens, “go,” he says, “I’ll keep you updated with whatever Walter comes up with” he’s just the nanny.

 

Olivia nods, worrying the inside of her lip with her teeth as she turns around, pushes through the threshold without looking back.

 

A record comes on in the background of the lab, Peter still standing as she left him, hands in pockets as he keeps his stare on the door a while longer. He has just taken a gamble, he only hopes lady luck will be kind enough to take pity.

 

“She’s beautiful isn’t she?” asks Walter from behind him, his eyes fixed on whatever experiment he’s come out of his room to check on. Peter hadn’t noticed him creep out, wonders how long he’s been standing there, watching. Not that it matters much anyway, that particular secret of his he’s shouted to the wind a while back, and Olivia is the only one who hasn’t listened.

 

There’s no point diverting this one.

 

“Yes, she is.”

 

 

(Day 108) 

 


	5. Echoes

How have they gotten here?

 

Her body shudders, the involuntary tremble of her muscles gradually diminishing as her diaphragm heaves. Her skin slides against his, their lungs straining for air in a room that has been witness to their folly. To the way his body moved under her, in her. To the way his hands made patterns both senseless and purposeful on the surface of her skin, his fingers whispering of places she has never been, pointing routes on maps made of freckles scattered across the expanse of her back, his mouth trailing paths of fire on her chest as his tongue chased droplets of sweat that ran astray. To the way her nails dug into his back, and the sound of breathless pleas that fled the confines of her throat.

 

How have they gotten here?

 

She tucks her head on the upward slope of his shoulder, closing her eyes against him as his hand comes to rest on her nape, his fingers firm yet soft, his touch light. He touches her like he plays the piano, his fingers careful, driven in a way that speaks of single-minded focus, and a tenderness that betrays the illusion of the rogue he shows the world.

 

This is Peter, she knows, this is the man underneath the rusty armor of sarcasm and cynicism. This is the man who lost everything to give them the world, the man that can’t call Walter “dad” for fear of his reaction (or rejection), the man that calls Lincoln a friend, and Astrid no less than a sister. The man that makes her laugh when the world has her think that no amount of screaming will be enough to make her feel sane again, and dares her to match him with a stubbornness that rivals her own.

 

This is Peter, as solid as bedrock underneath her, the give of his flesh against her own as vital as oxygen to her existence, as familiar as his scent on her nose; of pine needles after rain, of sandalwood and sweat, and the faintest hint of disinfectant that refuses to part with his skin.

 

Peter is heat, and shadows, and the color of the sky in those moments before the sun graces the world with its presence, when the horizon is tinged in swirls of indigo and red and everything between them. Peter is peace, and the soft string of disconnected endearments he murmurs against her skin, under his breath and out of earshot (he doesn’t want to scare her. Sometimes, he scares himself). Peter is a violent awakening, and conflict between parts of her that have been asleep for as long as she can remember. Peter is arrogant, and reckless. Peter is cunning, and scheming, and a fool. Peter is kind. Peter is caring, and wise. Peter is contradiction, and truth in the abyss of her life.

 

Peter is everything she cannot have.

 

How have they gotten here?

 

Time slows down, the seconds infinite under his watch, his touch feather light across her back, up and down, up and down. Soothing, caressing.

 

Moments like this, stolen and probably illegal, bring forgotten memories to mind, like pictures of a life he lived once, long ago and far away. He remembers a sudden passion for skating, one of those common flares of teenage rebellion that make one of the more normal moments in his twisted piece of space this side of the rabbit hole. He remembers the feeling of the ice beneath him, the ease with which his blades carved the smooth surface with figures and paths of his devising. Remembers the rush of racing, and finding (after an existence filled up with drugs, and fever, and sickness) that he could, that he was good at it. Remembers the pain too, of scraped knees and shredded skin. Remembers the contrast of his blood, an incriminating red against the pure whiteness of the rink. Remembers the small flare of pleasure from the pain of picking at the scabs, of scratching at stitches and healing flesh.

 

It had felt, back then, much like this. Much like her.

 

 He counts the knobs of her spine with calloused fingertips, and hands that have held the world(s) on their blood stained surfaces, the pressure distinct and increasing on the places where her velvety skin thins over her vertebrae, and he feels the gust of air on his cooling skin as her steadying breath stutters. And he loves this, loves her unmitigated reaction to him, loves to be able to make her feel like this, to be able to hold her close, and drown in her.

 

It makes him feel limitless. Gives him a reason, a purpose. Makes him think that he was born for this. Before there was a war, and death. Before a machine, and rage, and pain, and despair. Before time itself, this was where he was meant to be. What he was meant to do.

 

Call it destiny. Call it fate. Call it divine intervention, or perhaps sheer coincidence. As an advocate of choice above all else, Peter wouldn’t mind if that were true.

 

But Peter knows that all good things come to an end. Sooner rather than later, in his experience.  So he holds her tighter, perhaps seeking to mold her against him, fuse himself to her and not let go. He breaks the silence, and the room is heavy, oppressing, and filled with an emotion that once broke the world.

 

“What is this, ‘Livia?” he asks, his voice low and rough. He hates himself for it. Hates the way it makes him seem insecure, like he has to check before he steps, before he speaks, and hates the feeling of dread that sets into the pit of his stomach as he waits for her answer, “What are we doing?”

 

He swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing involuntarily as a symptom of his anxiety. Her form stiffens then, and he feels her move away, her body rolling until she lies beside him on her back. He closes his eyes; his arms letting her go with ease, though all he wants is to hold on, to make her stay. But he won’t be deemed her captor. He won’t force her hand, or her choice.

 

 _Shit_ , he thinks, and knows it is appropriate.

 

***

 

Olivia knows he loves her. He has never said it, but she doubts he needs to. It’s there, in every look, every word, every touch. Like he has been writing it under her skin for as long as he has been in it, printing his name on her flesh with ink as indelible as his kisses.

 

But love hurts, and truth is cruel. She knows this as surely as she knows her name, and who she is. As surely as she knows that it hurts because he’s a part of her that she has no right to. Somehow, someway he’s become a part of her, as vital as a heart, as integral as a brain.

 

She knows this as surely as she knows his truth, and hers: it isn’t _her_ he gave his heart to, though he took hers for his own with sleight of hand unprecedented, and skill unmatched.

 

“Does it need a name?” she asks, swallowing the acrid taste of fear on her tongue. She knows that, were she to look at him out of the corner of her eye, she’d find him shining with the strength of a couple thousand suns trapped in her retinas.

 

If her hands bleed tonight, where her short – but – sharp fingernails dig into her palms, she will see it as payment for his pain, and penitence for her sins. And still she’ll ask for more.

 

The cracking of his knuckles startles her. Makes her twist her head to look at him, at the streamlined tension of his body beside her on the bed and the multiple residual images of his motion that the ghost light around him leaves in hues of sickly yellow. Like a bad after taste that lingers or an old movie captured on defective film, a badly superimposed double exposure.

 

She looks, and finds clenched fists against his face, over his eyes; his jaw clenched so tightly that she can see the bunching of tenths of muscles in the darkness, underneath the soft stubble and glistening skin.

 

“Not really,” Peter says, and his usually rich voice is flat, bitter, exhausted, “I’m just the guy you fuck every so often, why label it something it’s not, right?”

 

Words are weapons. Olivia doesn’t know much about a lot of things (doesn’t know much about anything, really), but this…this she knows. Words cut you. Words rip you open, and stretch you out. Words leave you bare. Leave you vulnerable. Words leave you bleeding. Leave you aching, and empty.

Words are weapons, but weapons are only as efficient as the hand that wields them: give a girl a gun, any girl, any gun. Put a man in front of the girl, any man, and leave them to their own devices. Watch.

 

The girl does nothing.

 

This girl is sweet, and innocent, and her life is storybook perfect. She doesn’t know what guns are for. She has no reason to use them.

 

Rewind. Pick the same girl. Give her a mother who’s lonely and sad. Give her a sister. Give her a dead father, and a faulty replacement. Give this replacement fists of stone, and venom for blood. Make her know those fists, and what they’re capable of.

 

Now give the girl a gun. And watch.

 

You won’t be disappointed.

 

Weapons require a purpose. Require a will, and a minimum of skill. Peter Bishop has plenty of those, and she’s given him a reason to use them. It seems he’s reached the end of his rope.

 

It hurts. Though she’s been waiting for it, it hurts. Not just in her mind, not just as a figure of speech. It burns her insides, rips them apart, shreds them to pieces. It takes the air from her lungs, and the heat off her bones.

 

The sheets feel soft under her, she thinks. They’re gray, cool and comfortable. Spartan almost, in their simplicity, yet richly underplayed (much like him). This is his bed, his apartment. His space. It’s a ridiculous thought, a meaningless detail. It is her prime line of defense, her shield against heartache and pain.

 

It gives her time. It allows her to avoid, and evade. To compartmentalize. It’s the eye of the storm, a place in her mind to retreat to where everything is calm amidst the chaos. She can be weak later. Later, she can scream and she can cry. But not here, not now, and not in front of him.

 

“I should go,” she says, and her voice, though quiet and hoarse, does not break. She congratulates herself.

 

She makes her limbs move, gets away from the bed on wobbly legs and picks up what clothes she finds along her way. She doesn’t bother to cover herself, doesn’t bother with shame, or modesty. He has seen it all, felt it all, and while her skin is bare she hides anyway. She hides inside, in places devised as escape, as confinement. She doubts he’s looking her way.

 

It’s ironic, and frankly hilarious in a twisted sort of way, that the place she comes to hide is the bathroom. Almost like their roles have been reversed. She closes the tawny door after her, turns the halogen lights on with the flick of a switch and drops the clothes to the floor. She’s moving on autopilot, her mind blank yet swirling, his words running around in circles through her mind like a snake that swallows its own tail, with no beginning, no end. She runs her hands through the mess of her hair, and looks at the stranger in the mirror.

 

She’s never been especially fond of them. Of mirrors. Decreasingly so after her kidnapping, after being replaced by someone so like her, yet so infinitely different and have no one notice her absence. And she knows she’s not indispensable, and that the world will keep spinning, her presence not withstanding, but a tiny part of her hurts at knowing that no one cared enough, that no one knew enough to realize it wasn’t her behind those eyes. The other was just an image they were used to seeing, words they were used to hearing, mannerisms no one bothered to look beyond.

 

All in all, it’s no wonder she’s never been all that fond of her reflection.

 

It’s not that she’s bad looking, or that vanity matters altogether. It’s more that, when she looks in the mirror, she can’t help but think that there’s someone else in her reflection. Someone she doesn’t know. Someone she’s never met. Someone better perhaps, someone that’s just _more_.

 

Right now, both of her look worse for wear.

 

Her face is pale in the light, yet the flush on her chest remains, a reminder of his touch and his hands on her. There are bags under her eyes, and she wonders when the last time was that she slept the night. She wonders who he sees, when he looks at her. Who he talks to, when he speaks in her ear. Who he caresses when he touches her skin.

 

Whoever she is, beneath the shell of flesh and bones they share, wherever she exists (be it his mind or a world beyond), Olivia envies her.

 

She covers her face with her hands, steps back until the back of her legs hit the bathtub. She breathes deeply, looking at the crescent depressions on her palms, not deep enough for blood, but raw enough to sting. She sits, lets her body fall to the cold ceramic – covered floor, her knees to her chest as she looks at the nothing that lies ahead.

 

Her hand touches something beside her, and she looks. She finds a shirt, one that she does not remember grabbing, but that must have come along among her clothes as she fetched them from the floor. It’s dark, plain, and soft, and _his_.

 

She stretches the cloth over her knees, runs her fingers through it, drawing simple patterns on its surface, doing anything to avoid thought. She looses track of time.

 

The soft sound of the opening door shakes her from her reverie, and she looks to find him standing at the threshold, his hand on the door.

 

He’s put sweat pants on, the drawstrings loose and hanging at the front. He walks to her, sits beside her, close enough that she feels the heat coming off his skin but not enough to touch, and says nothing. He’s very good at waiting; even for things that he knows will never come.

 

She’s reminded of swing sets too small for her, and grass beneath her feet. She’s reminded of watchful companionship, and silent comfort. She’s reminded of him, in a place she’s been before, in a memory not her own, in a life she’s never lived.

 

Memory is a funny thing. Incomprehensible and deceiving, perfect, and out of reach, and everything they have, in the end. She wonders if she’s doomed to stay like this: to get flashes of lives not her own, moments that were but are no more, disconnected and confusing, like permanent déjà vu. But perhaps that’s a good thing. She’ll never know.

 

“Is that really what you think of me?” she asks then. She asks because she can’t help it, because even though she knows she deserves it, part of her hopes that he doesn’t hate her, that he _sees_ her, that he knows her, “that I’m …using you?”

 

“What is it then?” he asks, and he doesn’t want it to sound so desperate, so hopeless. He slides back on the smooth tiles of the bathrooms floor, resting his head on the bathtub’s edge as he fixes his eyes on the ceiling.

 

“I – I don’t know” she admits, clenches her hands on the fabric of the shirt she’s got bunched on her lap. His shirt.

 

Peter sighs.

 

“Look,” he says, tired, his voice gravelly and pleading, “this was ridiculous the first time, and then we kept repeating it…” he breathes in slowly, steadies himself, “I don’t care anymore. I don’t care what you make of me, what you feel, if you feel anything; it would be nice, but it’s not really a requirement. I’ll be whatever you want. I’ll be your consultant; I’ll be your drinking partner. I’ll be your punching bag. I’ll be your fuck buddy if you still feel like it. I’ll even be your friend if you let me, but Olivia…I can’t read your mind, not yet. So what _do_ you want?”

 

And of course he lies. Of course he cares, of course he wants her to feel something, anything. But that’s not the point. He just wants her to be happy, his place in that is nothing but a plus, and up to her decision, like it has always been.

 

She bites her tongue, not really knowing what to say, what to do. After a while, when the silence is stretched so thin that it might burst, he stands. He bends at the waist, grabs her hand in his, and squeezes.

 

“Think on it,” he says, before he turns to go, and his eyes are warm, the storm that is always there all – consuming, all – encompassing.

 

This is the Peter she knows, in those eyes, in that look. This is the Peter she loves, the only one there is.

 

This is the Peter she loves.

 

 _‘So what_ do _you want_ ,’ he’d said. She thinks she might have found the answer.

 

 

***

 

The goose down of the quilt is heavy, its cozy weight welcome in the chill air of the room as she makes her way under the covers, the mattress dipping slightly under her weight as she comes to rest against his figure.

 

He lies on his side, his back to her. She’s not offended, she doubts he expected her to do this. To come back. To be fair, she did not expect it either.

 

She presses her lips against his back, tentative, and tastes the salt of his sweat – sleek skin on her tongue. He tastes of sex. Tastes of him, and her. He tastes like home, like warmth on a sunny morning, and joy. He tastes of tears, she thinks, tears and regret.

 

She doesn’t want to regret this, doesn’t want to regret him.

 

And so she wraps her arms around him, clutches him against her, her hands on his chest splayed against the steady thump, thump, thump of his heart. He lies still, unmoving, only the rhythm of the rise and fall of his chest letting her know that he is just as awake. She rests her head up against him, her cheek on his shoulder, and she waits.

 

Peter moves, after a moment. He slides a hand up her arm, weaves his fingers with hers as they hold him close. He sighs, wishes time to stop, to let him live in this moment forever, without a world that crumbles at their feet like cities built of sugar in the rain, and the uncertainty of a future built on the ruins of a past that only he remembers.

 

 She’s no more different than he is, this time around, as different as their experiences have made them. But he knows her. Though her details might escape him, he knows her. The rest he can learn along the way.

 

And maybe it _is_ time that stays. Maybe it’s them that move forward, always forward. Maybe it’s him that needs to stop, look back.

 

“What is it that you’re so afraid of?” he asks, his voice soft, frustrated. He can feel her hesitate, can feel the clenching of her hand on his sternum, and the swell of her breasts against his back as she presses their bodies closer, her forehead leaning on his back like she needs the contact for support. For strength.

 

Perhaps she does.

 

“How long, Peter?” she speaks then, the slightest waver in her voice, “how long until you realize I’m not what you’re looking for?”

 

Though he knows she can’t see it, he frowns, taken aback by her words, by the certainty and the defeat that stain the tone of her voice. He does not (cannot) understand.

 

“What is that supposed to mean?” he asks, befuddled as he has ever been, not able to make heads or tails of the origins of her suggestion, the root of this nonsense on her mind. He rolls onto his back, the sheets twisting and tangling between them, her form pressed tight to his side, her hand on his chest, between his.

 

“You love a memory, Peter,” she says, and her hold on him loosens, lets go. He feels her move away, putting distance between them, her breath warm on his face as her eyes avoid him, “you love someone who’s in your head, someone I _can’t_ be…” She chokes a little, her next breath shaky as she speaks on, like a dam that has finally broken, “and…you don’t deserve this. You shouldn’t have to be stuck with a second rate version of her out of some white knight complex. Out of some…some twisted sense of duty, or whatever it is that keeps you here.”

 

He just looks at her, his stare piercing, and then, in true Peter fashion, he does what she least expects of him. He laughs.

 

He laughs in disconcert, and true hilarity. He laughs because he should have seen this coming, should have known the reasons for her reluctance, and her rejection. Some things remain the same, constants in an equation of ever changing variables and infinite unknowns. _She_ remains the same, under the surface, under her skin.

 

“ You beautiful idiot,” he says, and his smile is slow, languid as he continues his body’s motion, rolling until he faces her fully, holding her forehead locked against his own, so close they breathe the same air.

 

“Olivia,” he says, his voice serious, his eyes smiling, “there are no versions of _you_. No one who feels the way you do, no one who thinks the same, or acts the same. There is only you. And yes, you are different…” he touches her chest, traces the freckles on her neck, “but you have the same fears, the same scars.” She knows he doesn’t mean her skin, “you’re different, but you’re still the same everywhere that matters.”

 

With Peter, she has found fear. She has found hopelessness, and despair. With Peter, she has found a friend, a lover. She has found a home. She has found herself.

 

So she looks, and looks, and looks. And, after a while, she sees only Peter.

 

“…I want _you_ ,” she says to the dark, to his smile, and his eyes, and the feel of his heart as it beats beneath her lips.

 

As it happens, Olivia never did understand, before that moment, that while love stays, love holds and waits, truth is subjective to reality. That reality, and its multiple iterations, is as malleable as glass and equally as fragile.

 

Just like sand.

 

Just like memory.

 

Just like time.

 

(Time doesn’t matter)


End file.
